Upon a Midnight Clear
by DezoPenguin
Summary: PSO.  The Christmas season is supposed to be one of peace, harmony and love, but instead Ryland finds family obligations pulling himself and Lyon into a case of murder and stolen research that hits too close to home in many ways.
1. Chapter 1

**AUW 3086, December**

Justine Trent's lip curled as she passed by a cheap holo-display of Santa Claus ringing a bell. The unit played carols from a speaker at its base, but its low-quality equipment was already malfunctioning, changing the music tones to something tinny and irritating.

It was stupid, anyway, she thought. What was the point of a Christmas display in Downtown, anyway? Peace on earth and goodwill towards men were rare enough to be considered endangered species in this neighborhood.

The colony spaceship _Pioneer 2_ had left Coral in early AUW 3083, designed to join its predecessor in settling the planet Ragol. It had arrived nearly two years later in the fall of 3084, but a disaster had engulfed the _Pioneer 1_ settlement. Elite operatives called hunters investigated the surface on behalf of the Administration, the military, and the scientific establishment, but no official word had ever been established. In the interim, the people waited, kept in orbit until word would finally come that they could leave. Hopes and dreams of a new life slowly blurred with the waiting, and the city at the heart of the ship began to feel like home for most of its inhabitants. It was little different from a city on Coral, after all: it had residences, an industrial district, corporate presences with a self-contained economy, cultural outlets and entertainment venues...and Downtown.

Downtown was a slum. Unlike in ground-based cities, its name came from the fact that it was literally "down," encompassing the lower three levels of about a half of the city's structures. Here were the dregs: those who couldn't bear up under the pressures of life, those who preyed on them, those who dealt in petty illegality and those who sought their cover to commit more serious crimes. It certainly hadn't been planned; its creation was strictly the spawn of human nature. That it had come to be in time to greet the first Christmas on _Pioneer 2_, three years ago, told Justine more truths about people then any number of seasonal platitudes could trick her into believing. It had been the _first_ part of the city to adapt to being a "real" settlement, that the rest was now only catching up to at the close of the fourth year on the ship.

_At least there isn't any snow_, Justine thought. The only thing sillier than Christmas in a nest of criminal gangs and wireheads, flesh mills and dingy bars, street-fighters and e-runners, was snow covering it all up. But there wasn't any weather in the ship's sealed environment except breezes caused by the air-recirculation systems.

If the truth were to be told, though, most of Justine's mood had nothing to do with the weather or with the circumstances of Downtown. The ache in her temples wasn't from badly played music, the dryness of her mouth wasn't from too many drinks the night before, and the slight shake that started in her limbs when she stopped walking and tried to stand still didn't come from sleeplessness. She hadn't ridden the wire for over three thousand beats and it was starting to tell.

She'd tried to kick the habit a couple of times, largely because her mostly-boyfriend didn't like it, but the gnawing at the back of her mind kept returning, the urge to escape the Downtown grunge and the gnawing paralysis of life in the bottle. That she was starting to show more than a mental need bothered her; hotwiring shunted the body's own nerve impulses and instead forced the brain to accept five-sense virtual reality input in its place. The technology was crude and could result in brain damage—wireburn, they called it.

Knowing that, though, didn't stop Justine from wanting more, looking for the next ride. Her usual source did his business up ahead, next to a bar called Falcone's where he would duck inside for a couple of shots of his own intoxicant of choice when the work got too thirsty.

Maybe the thirst had gotten to him already, Justine thought, because he wasn't there. A couple of other guys were, but they looked more like buyers than sellers: a bulky human with a pale yellow eight-inch-high mohawk and a wiry Newman wearing baggy pants and a vest revealing tattoos all over his olive-skinned torso that pulsed with luminescent inks.

She strolled over, figuring she'd wait. The man turned to look; Justine was used to that. She was a blonde Newman with wet-dream curves tightly sheathed in violet leather and chain-mail fishnets, stiletto heels turning every step into a swivel-hipped promise. So yeah, she was used to getting stares and second looks. She wasn't used to this kind, though, hard and flat.

"Chill, boys; I'm just looking for Eddy," she said.

"Yeah, we know. That's why we told him to take a break inside," said the human.

"Huh?"

"We've got a message. Tell your boyfriend to pass it along to his brother, okay?"

Justine edged back, not liking where this was heading.

"What kind of message?"

The Newman smiled at her, catlike, almost feral in the expression's cruelty.

"I think he'll figure it out."

The human's hands dropped into his pockets and came out having slipped into chrome-plated reinforced knuckles. The Newman's hand flickered and the gravity knife he'd been palming spun open.

Running would be best, but in her ridiculous heels Justine could barely manage anything faster than a brisk walk. She'd never get anywhere to hide or find help. And frankly she wasn't likely to _find_ help. This was Downtown, where no one would push into a stranger's business if they didn't have an angle.

The two street-fighters rushed her and she readied herself to meet them. She didn't have a knife or a gun, but that didn't mean she was unarmed, not when her fingernails had been replaced by razor-edged knives anchored to the bones. The human led the way, swinging a roundhouse punch at her, but she gouged along the meat of his upper arm. He gave a sharp cry of pain that made her exult momentarily, but he recovered fast, too fast, coming around with a low left. Justine tried to pivot away—she had the reflexes for it, even while craving the wire—but her balance in the spiked heels wasn't good enough to give her the footing she needed. Her foot slipped, and the punch hammered into her belly so hard it seemed like it made her stomach bounce off her spine. The breath rushed out of her, and in the next instant a jab broke her nose, drawing blood. Pain drowned her world as she felt a cold line trace across her back—the Newman must have cut her. In the next instant she was flung down hard onto the hard street surface, jarring her whole body.

"Stupid wannabe razorbitch cut me," the human cursed. "She's going to pay for that."

"Just remember, if she can't pass on the message, _we_ aren't going to get paid."

"Don't worry, Jehan." His boot crashed down on Justine's forearm, snapping the bone. "Unlike this poser, I know how to do a job right."

~X X X~

Donovan Ryland awoke to the shrill beeping of his Personal Data Link. He'd been lost in a dream where he'd been fighting in No Man's Mines underneath the surface of the planet Ragol, with an unending stream of security robots coming at him, an intruder alarm screaming in the background. The sheets he'd managed to get tangled around his limbs had expressed themselves as a Sinow Blue's deathly grip, and it took a couple of seconds to shake off the illusion and return to reality. It took a couple more for him to realize that the PDL wasn't making an alarm clock or incoming-call alert, but the sound for an urgent simple-mail message.

He fumbled for his square-rimmed, wire-framed spectacles, slipped them into place, and found the button that told the PDL to shut up already. The chronometer function said that it was 213 beats; still pre-dawn if they'd been been on a planet which had a dawn rather than a spaceship with artificial lighting. Ryland was not much of a morning person under ordinary circumstances; he tended to stay up way too late reading until the words started to blue and his foggy brain started reading the same sentence over multiple times. He actually slept better when actively on a job for the Hunter's Guild, because he had something that made him focus on the real world. That wasn't the case now; he'd barely had a hundred and fifty beats' sleep.

Sighing, he called up the simple-mail function. He had only one new message, with the urgent flag or without, so he had no trouble identifying which one was the one he was looking for. The name in the sender line jolted him closer towards being awake.

_Curses, Kendric, what have you gotten yourself into this time?_

His relationship with his brother had never been all that close; they'd gone opposite ways when their parents had divorced, Ryland with their father and Kendric with their mother. They'd gone opposite directions in life, too—careers, environment, interests, and economics. This past February, they'd worked together on one of Ryland's Guild Quests, which had nudged them a little closer, but that was still not particularly near to "ordinary" brotherly affection.

Not the kind of relationship that gives rise to urgent messages in the dead of night.

Whatever the mail said, it meant trouble.

Ryland opened it.

A little under forty beats later, he stepped off the warp platform from the parking area where he'd docked his aerocar to the lobby of the Medical Center. He was dressed for business, which for him meant flowing green robes reminiscent of a medieval wizard's. The fashion statement was customary for human Forces, masters of manipulating Photon energy through "techniques" that, although grounded in scientific engineering, might as well have been magic from an onlooker's point of view. His bright red hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and his expression was not happy. In fact, it was positively forbidding. He headed straight for the reception desk, intending to ask which room the patient was in, when he was cut off.

"Hold off on that, bro."

He snapped his head to the right, where Kendric's voice had come from. At first he didn't recognize his brother among the people seated in the ranks of hard plastic chairs, before identifying the young man in baggy, blue-gray trousers, a ripped T-shirt with a band's logo on it, and a black leather vest. A knit cap was pulled down, covering his shock of hair as brightly red as Ryland's, and oversized sunshades with a mirrored blue finish acted almost like a mask for his upper face, which was why Ryland hadn't instantly noticed him.

"Is this some kind of game?" Ryland snapped angrily.

"You think I'm joking, that I'd play around about Justine?"

"I don't know what you would or wouldn't do."

"C'mon. I'll take you up to her and I'll explain. Or don't'cha have the guts to face her?"

"Given that I have no idea what you are talking about, or what you said in your message, I have no need of guts."

Ryland winced inwardly when he heard himself talking. His partner Lyon had noticed it first, that whenever he and Kendric were around one another they slipped more strongly into their roles: Kendric threw more street argot into his speech and Ryland started sounding like an uppity, overeducated snob. It bothered him that Kendric had any power over him, even accidentally as a subconscious response.

But then again, being woken from very little sleep by an angry message that Justine had been seriously injured and that it was somehow supposed to be _his_ fault was not the best way to put him in a good mood. Inwardly seething; he followed Kendric to the bank of elevators.

"You check for tails on the way over?"

"Tails? No, why would I?"

Kendric scowled.

"Hell, you got no clue at all, don't'cha, big bro? Just crashing through life leaving everybody else to clean up after."

Ryland stopped in his tracks.

"That's it. I'm leaving."

Kendric's hand flashed out and caught the Force by the forearm.

"Hey, listen here, you're not—"

"No, you listen," Ryland shot back, snapping his arm loose with a twist. He might only have been a Force, but he was still a hunter, and he had hand-to-hand training that could leave his brother becoming a patient here instead of visiting one. The intellectual, in this case, was the better fighter than the street punk.

A whisper of something, conscience maybe, or family feeling, corrected that thought. _No, Kendric's not some street-fighter. He uses his brain for his work as much as I do._ Kendric was an e-runner, a net-dancer who made his living inside other people's computer systems. Close combat was a secondary skill for both of them, not primary.

None of that affected how he felt, though.

"No, you listen," he repeated. "So far all I've had from you is a lot of attitude and zero information about where it's coming from. You talked about me not having a clue? Well, you're right. _All_ I know is that you woke me out of a deep sleep with a lot of sound and fury and very little concrete information. I haven't so much as _thought_ of you in weeks, let alone concerned myself with your business, so either start making some sense right now or I'm going home to bed."

Angry stares met each other, both brothers glaring into each other's eyes.

It was Kendric who broke first, turning away with a sharp sigh and stabbing the elevator call button.

"You really don't know, do you? Damn, that's really sick, those bastards. All right, I'm going to trust those hunter instincts of yours would have noticed anything off just by reflex, though I'd have preferred to trust that android partner of yours on that. Where is she, anyway?"

"Probably at home in her recharge pod, if she's lucky. Or did you call her in, too?"

Kendric shook his head. The elevator doors swished open and they went inside. The brothers rode up to the seventh floor of the medical center.

"You were concerned about people following me," Ryland mused, adding together the few facts he had. "You're wearing that cap and sunshades. You didn't want me asking after Justine at the reception desk. And you sent me simple-mail, which is considerably harder to hack or trace than a PDL call. What's going on here? Why all the secrecy?"

"I've got Justine here under an assumed name, a false identification so that the people who did this won't be able to get at her again. The problem is that they also know about us, and it's not real smart to hide somebody, then lead people right to 'em."

Kendric led the way down the hall from the elevator and stopped at Room 756. A display on the door read "Alina Branch" in green letters. They went inside to a partitioned room, the bed and monitoring equipment on one side of a barrier field like the kind used in security gates. Ryland barely recognized the bandage-swathed figure.

"What happened to her?"

"A couple of goons kicked her around hard. They were thorough and systematic about it, experts at their job. Broken bones, internal injuries, just enough to stay on this side of being alive."

"Then why is she like that?"

"When she passed out waiting for the ambulance, she lapsed into a coma." He paused, then sighed. "It's the damn wire. She's starting to get the shakes."

"Physical symptoms of hotwire habituation," Ryland said, then summed it up with the street term. "Wireburn."

"The doc said that her injuries were so severe, her brain reacted by trying to jump the wire on its own, without any input. Fixing the injuries is easy enough—well, you'd know that, as a hunter—but the brain's different."

Ryland understood. Photon-based medical technology could do amazing things up to and including healing many injuries instantaneously, even restoring life to the clinically dead, but the brain _was_ different. In many ways, to Photon healing the brain _was_ the person, and too much damage to it made such healing impossible. That was one reason why wireburn was such a menace, because the damage was difficult and in some cases impossible to repair.

"I'm surprised—" he began, then cut himself off. It was a topic he didn't want to visit.

"That given what Mom went through, I'd take up with a wirehead?" Kendric finished for him. "That would be the rational thing to think, right? Maybe some day, Donny, you'll learn that you don't get to choose who you've got feelings for. Justine's not just a bounce I could tell to shove off 'cause she's got bad habits, you get it? And wirehead or not, she wouldn't _be_ here if it wasn't for _your_ business."

Temper flaring, he whirled on Ryland again and grabbed two fistfuls of the front of his robe.

"It's all 'cause you haven't got anyone you give a damn about, so just because we're blood your enemies came after _my_ girl to get to you. She said they told her to have her boyfriend—me—tell his brother—you—to keep his nose out of business that doesn't concern him. Do you get the picture?"

Several different denials came up at once, fighting each other to get out so that he ended up remaining silent. He would argue that he had plenty of people he cared about; just because he wasn't dating didn't make him a friendless social misfit. Most of them tended to be hunters or trained Forces, though, which made for a considerably more difficult target to threaten. That, he guessed, was the real reason whomever it was had gone after Justine, since anyone who knew him well would know he didn't have a good relationship with Kendric. He'd been partners with Lyon for over a year before mentioning his brother to her, and then only because they'd needed his e-skills for a Guild Quest.

The one that was most obvious, though, and which finally won out and was said out loud, was, "Kendric, I'm not working right now."

"What?"

"I don't have any active Guild Quests; we finished our last job three days ago. It wasn't even anything complex, just an escort run for a Lab botanist collecting samples on Gal Da Val Island."

The eighteen-year-old looked like someone had punched him in the gut.

"That doesn't effing make sense!"

"I know, but it's the truth. I'm not working on anything right now that someone would want me to drop, and my last job isn't something that would inspire revenge."

"Your last job, yeah, but you're telling me that nobody at all out there wants payback from you."

Ryland looked at him helplessly.

"I'm sure there's a number of people, criminals I've caught, plotters I've gotten on the wrong side of," he agreed, "but nothing immediate. Besides, when people want revenge, at least when it's more complex than a sniper's shot through the head and involves third parties, it's important to them to make the victim know who is doing it and why." Revenge, after all, was about rough justice, punishment for a real or imagined wrong done to someone. The avenger almost always wanted to make the one being revenged upon suffer and regret the original act. "Unless the person responsible somehow thinks he or she is the only person who wants revenge on me..."

He let his voice trail off, as both brothers could see the absurdity of that idea. Unless the person was completely delusional, that wasn't possible, and if they were that deluded then the revenge might be for _anything—_accidentally letting his shadow fall on him or her, taking the last sweetener packet at the coffee shop, anything at all.

"What about private stuff, then?" Kendric rallied from his momentary confusion. "You're always doing research into old stuff. Maybe you're poking around where someone doesn't want you."

"If that were the case, I'd like to think there's be some step to dissuade me before resorting to _this_." He gestured towards the unconscious girl. "No one's ever complained or tried to deny me access to the ship's data archive. And my pet projects are all highly theoretical, anyway, without immediate real-world consequences. That doesn't rule them out, but..."

"Then why the hell is Justine like that?" Kendric snapped at him, stabbing his finger towards her. "What's the point of sending a message if the people you send it to have no idea what it is?"

"I don't know, Kendric." _And that might be scarier than what actually happened._ If it was revenge, maybe that was the point? To make him feel helpless and confused so he'd suffer more before hitting him with the reasons later?

A piped-in rendition of a Christmas carol was playing over the medical center's PA system in the hall. With a young woman who might never wake up and it looking like the small gains he'd made in his relationship with his brother over the past year were crumbling away, the message of peace and goodwill seemed for the first time in Ryland's life like a bad joke.

~X X X~

_A/N: For those who may not remember, "beat time" is the timekeeping system used in PSO, supposedly for purposes of helping players in different time zones coordinate play. An idea poorly executed...but it does work for giving that "alien culture" feel to the ship when the characters use it. In any case, there are 1000 beats in a 24-hour day, so that each beat is 1.44 minutes long (86.4 seconds)._


	2. Chapter 2

Android Weinstine Co. Type L/Y-906, more colloquially known as Lyon, hummed a Christmas carol as she walked down the residential building's hall. A humming android was not a common sight, but Lyon was, like most androids in the Hunter's Guild, an advanced model with a highly complex AI designed to simulate that of an organic female, including emotions. She was happy this morning, and her personality matrix had produced a priority suggestion that this happiness be expressed externally.

She stopped outside the door to her partner's res-unit and touched the panel for his door chime. 0.5 beats passed, and she touched it again. When that also did not produce a response, she called him on his PDL. Lyon wondered if he was out, the most obvious reason why he might not answer his door. It took eight rings for him to answer and his voice, thick and fuzzy, told her that it was the second-most obvious answer instead.

"Hello?"

"Rise and shine, Ryland. We have a meeting scheduled for 450."

"Lyon? Wait...a meeting? What?"

"Don't worry; you didn't forget to schedule something. I got you an early Christmas present."

"Lyon, I've been up most of the night. It's 403 and I only got back to bed at 387. You're going to have to speak slowly and use small words."

"Okay, but would you let me in? It'd be easier to do it face-to-face."

"All right; just let me get some pants on."

A couple of moments later, the door opened and a very bleary-looking Ryland, shadows under his eyes, wearing loose sweatpants and a sleeveless undershirt, let her into the res-unit.

"You look like hell," Lyon said sympathetically. "I'm sorry for springing this on you; I'd have given you advance warning if I'd known you had plans."

Ryland shook his head.

"That's all right; I didn't actually have plans. It's just bad luck I had two things surprise me together."

"Oh, I see. Well, you'd better get dressed. If you need to, you can always back out later, but it would look bad if you didn't show up for the initial meeting."

"You're probably right. Um...would you mind waiting out here?" he asked as she followed him towards the bedroom.

"Ryland, you know that I am not ESI-compatible."

"I know, but you're still a woman."

She nodded.

"Very well, I'll wait here."

That was very typical of Ryland, Lyon thought, and one of the things she liked about him: he never failed to treat her as a person. Many people, including some hunters, viewed androids as second-class citizens, or little more than machines, tools. This perception had not been helped by the fact that most generally _were_ machines in the past, and even modern androids did not always have extensive personality matrices like Lyon's that included the full range of organic emotions. Military androids, for example, often were designed without compassion or valuing life outside their own allegiance.

Ryland, though, always treated her just as he would anyone else. Indeed, when he erred it was inevitably in the other direction, when he reacted as if she was indeed an organic instead of taking into account the fact of her being an android. His modesty was a perfect example. While Lyon was quite capable of forming emotional ties, up to and including romantic love, she had no _sexual_ feelings. It was possible to install parts and programming (ESI stood for Extraordinary Social Interaction, which Lyon thought was a bit delicate a description for a very straightforward concept) that could allow an android to engage in and desire sexual contact, but Lyon felt the concept was kind of pointless unless she should happen to fall in love with an organic who would desire such activity as part of their relationship.

Nonetheless, her personality matrix indicated that it was a suitable response for an organic to exhibit modesty around a gender to which they were attracted, regardless of the observer's potential interest or lack thereof, so she'd complied with Ryland's wishes. In any case, it was a simple matter to raise her speaking volume to be heard in the next room.

"Speaking of ESI, I was thinking of getting Rina that upgrade as a Christmas gift," she said. "Since she only needs the parts installed"—their friend's AI had been created in a somewhat unusual fashion—"it won't be as expensive as the full job would be, and she'd be really grateful."

"She and Nyle are still together, then?"

"Uh-huh. They're even talking marriage."

"Well, that's a good thing. I was never really as hopeful as you were about the outcome of that job. I'm glad I was wrong."

"You're just a cynic, that's your problem. And you really shouldn't be, since you're such a romantic about history and magic and all that. You turn basic technology into a storyteller's dream, and yet you have trouble believing in happily-ever-after or at least 'till-death-do-us-part between people."

"Photon technology is more reliable than people are."

Lyon crossed her arms over her chest in an attitude of disapproval. She knew no one was there to see her, but her body-language functions called for consistent behavior regardless of the situation.

"Was that including the parts of it that are based on using the body of an evil god of chaos as an experimental base?"

"Sarcasm does not become you at this hour of the morning."

"Oh? When would it be appropriate?"

"I haven't really found an answer to that one, yet."

Lyon hadn't been simply exaggerating. The so-called D-Factor, which allowed for some of the more amazing things Photon technology could do in the area of physical transformation, had proven to be drawn from the emanations of Dark Falz. The Pioneer Project had been directed to Ragol rather than other suitable worlds for settlement because it was the source of the D-Factor, which had led to _Pioneer 1_'s destruction. Thankfully due to the efforts of hunters and the wills of its possessed victims, Rico Tyrell and Heathcliff Flowen, the entity had been suppressed. She couldn't help but wonder, though; so long as there was a changeable universe, could such an elemental force as chaos and entropy really be defeated? Perhaps on Ragol it had been beaten, but couldn't its will manifest elsewhere, such as back on Coral?

"I think I've been hanging around you too long, Ryland," she said aloud.

"Oh?"

"That last exchange triggered a series of philosophical musings on the nature of Dark Falz and whether it would ever be possible to be truly free of it."

"Quite possibly not; after all, the opposite of chaos is stasis, and life can't exist in a perfectly static universe. Maybe that's what it means that Dark Falz resurrects in the 'millennial cycle'; somehow, it is an inherent part of the nature of the universe, or at least of Photon energy."

"You see what I mean? You came up with that off the cuff in response to a casual remark. You're corrupting me with your romantic ideas about universal forces, and I don't seem to be corrupting you back."

"Experience," Ryland said. He emerged from the bedroom dressed in a Force's robes, apparently ready for business.

"Oh?" Lyon tilted her head to regard him curiously.

"You're what, three years old? So you can overwrite your existing database pretty easily since that's just pre-programmed facts. I'm twenty-six, so I've got actual life experience shaping my opinions, so it's not so easy for them to be dislodged."

She thought about it.

"That makes sense. My own decision-making algorithms are designed to give higher priority to information that I obtain myself versus information that comes from external sources, simply as a matter of reliability." She waited just a moment, then added teasingly, "I guess we just need to find you a nice girlfriend so we can build your experience positively."

Lyon had expected one of the typical responses: embarrassment, bluster, a long-suffering groan. She'd even calculated a 5.4-percent probability of Ryland losing his temper due to her teasing growing too personal, at which point she would apologize (like an organic, it was quite possible for her to make bad judgments in interpersonal relationships). But Ryland's response hadn't fallen into any of the predicted categories. Instead, his face turned pensive, as if remembering something unpleasant or unhappy. Lyon might have assumed he was thinking about someone who'd broken his heart and soured him on romance, but that did not match up with past conversations—and she was sure there was no _recent_ heartbreak in his life.

She was quite curious, now, but her next-stage analysis suggested that based on their established relationship levels this was none of her business and as the friendship was a higher emotional priority than her desire to know, she deflected attention from the topic while subtly reminding him that his reaction existed (to invite him to talk if _he_ felt like it) but changing the subject.

"You look like you're going to fall over if you don't get some caffeine in you. I picked up a cup of coffee for you from Leeson's on the way over; it's waiting for you in my aerocar."

"If there's a Heaven for androids, that alone should be enough to get you in." Ryland, Lyon had noted, enjoyed his coffee.

"Good. Then if that's settled, let's go."

"Where are we going?"

"I told you that it was a Christmas present. Don't expect me to tell you before we unwrap it."

~X X X~

"I appreciate you meeting me here rather than at the Hunter's Guild," Revelle Lucerne said. She was a Newman, with the look of a woman in her late twenties. She wore a long, flowing dress and had her silver hair done up in an elaborate style, her overall appearance reminding Ryland of nothing so much as a female human Force. "The truth is that I'm frightened to have it known I'm meeting with hunters."

"Oh? What are you afraid of?" he asked.

"A rival. His name is Tobias Stane, and I believe he was responsible for my father's death."

"Maybe you should start at the beginning," Lyon said.

They were sitting at a corner table in the Blue Grotto, a restaurant and club which ran off an undersea theme. While the aqueous light filtering down from the ceiling and the coral reefs beneath the floor were projected by highly lifelike viewscreens, the walls actually were aquarium tanks with live fish. Lyon enjoyed the animals' antics, Ryland knew, making this one of her favorite places to hang out or have meetings. The food was, in his opinion, lousy (and the coffee nearly undrinkable), but she didn't consider that any kind of problem for obvious reasons.

Lucerne, for her part, didn't seem to notice the food quality, consuming her grilled salmon-substitute and rice with apparent enthusiasm. A squid seemed to eye them before swimming away, perhaps jealous that these land-dwellers had usurped its rightful spot in the food chain.

"My father's name was Dr. Kylan Lucerne. He worked for the Lab as a Photon engineer. His specialty was weapons research and design."

"That's a provocative field."

Lucerne nodded.

"I know, and one that isn't always well-regarded. Whenever one builds a weapon, one is already accepting the possibility of violence, and weapons research is about making killing faster and easier."

"Of course, you're talking with hunters," Lyon told the Newman, "so you have an audience ready to believe that some forms of violence are necessary and even positive. Believe me, when a rampaging dragon is trying to bake me extra-crispy, I appreciate having the newest and best weapons I can have."

Their client gave her a wan smile.

"I'm glad to hear that." Ryland suspected that she'd gotten a certain amount of grief from other people over that—and it was true enough that the weapons business was by no means a clean one. Unethical scientific testing like Dr. Osto Hyle's bioweapons projects and equally unethical sales of arms to people that were guaranteed to misuse them by "merchants of death" like Black Paper had definitely painted it in a negative light. But as Lyon had pointed out, fighting could be done to protect as well as to seize or destroy, and guardians needed the best equipment just as did reavers.

"In any case, Father's particular area of interest was in ancient legendary weapons and how they could be duplicated with Photon technology." She frowned. "I'm not explaining that quite right. It's more...he believed that ancient weapons were created _with_ Photon technology, and he wanted to understand them in today's scientific terms so they could be recreated if it was feasible."

"So your father thought that Photon was used in the ancient past, but as a kind of alchemy?"

Lyon grinned at him, or rather at how eagerly he'd asked the question.

"Yes, that's right."

"My partner has the same belief," Lyon said.

"It's more than a belief; it's a working hypothesis backed by some supporting evidence and without significant contradiction."

"Father thought so, too. He believed that he had the opportunity to at last validate that hypothesis as a theory."

_No wonder Lyon called this job a Christmas present!_ Ryland thought. It was exactly on point for one of his own pet theories about Photon and Ragol.

"Explain, please."

"Father learned that there had been, I guess you could call it a 'relic,' from ancient Coral on board _Pioneer 1_, a hand-to-hand weapon known as the Psycho-Wand. The weapons research project of the _Pioneer 1_ Lab had apparently succeeded in creating a few duplicates of this item, which _Pioneer 2_'s hunters have occasionally found."

Ryland nodded sharply.

"Yes, indeed. They're prized by Forces, since they function to augment techniques in multiple ways—oh! I see exactly what Dr. Lucerne was driving at. If he could prove that the _original_ Psycho-Wand had the same effect on techniques which had not been invented yet in ancient Coral, then it would be strongly suggestive that what we called Photon and the ancients called magic were the same energy. Particularly, the Psycho-Wand was supposed to be a 'wizard's staff,' so its effect on techniques would not be an accidental side effect."

Lucerne smiled at him, a wistful sadness in her expression.

"You sound just like Father." She glanced over at Lyon. "You were right when you said that your partner would appreciate the details of this job. I'm...I'm glad that it's someone who understands the importance of what Father was trying to do that will take it on."

"I only wish I could have known him," Ryland said. "But if there's anything I can do to help establish this link to our past, then I want to try." He paused, then added, "But I'm sorry; I let my enthusiasm get the better of me. The combination of a topic of interest and the fact that I'm running on caffeine instead of sleep this morning will do that to me. Please, go on with your story and I'll try to stop interrupting you."

The young Newman sipped at her glass of juice. It apparently wasn't as awful as the Grotto's coffee tended to be, or else she was simply a stoic about such things.

"Father thought he knew where the Psycho-Wand had been kept, so he commissioned a hunter team to try and retrieve the relic itself as well as, if possible, the _Pioneer 1_ research data. He pinpointed a subterranean facility on Gal Da Val Island connected to one of the Control Tower and accompanied the group down personally. Only one hunter returned. Apparently there had been an ambush led by a rival team."

Ryland scowled. There were bad apples in every group, but it particularly bothered him when hunters went wrong. Since Principal Tyrell had placed the job of investigating Ragol in the hands of hunters, many criminal and political groups had planted their agents in the guild so that they could use them for intelligence gathering and even shadier work.

"You suspect this Tobias Stane of being behind it?"

"I do. He's an influential man, a member of the Council, and a passionate collector of matters associated with ancient Coralian history. He doesn't care about the scientific significance of the Psycho-Wand; he just wants it as a prize to possess."

"It was the hunter who escaped who told you about the ambush and your father's death?" Lyon asked.

Lucerne nodded.

"He did."

"Can we talk to him?"

She looked down into her meal, her face falling.

"He's dead. Apparently it was a bar fight, but I can't believe that. I think Stane's men wanted to get their hands on what he knew or what he had, and they killed him for it."

"Maybe. What was his name?"

"Barton Dorn."

"_Did_ he know anything?" Ryland asked. "I mean, was there anything to know?" He stopped. "No, there must have been, unless the bar fight was just a bar fight. Otherwise, he was either killed to keep him from identifying the ambushers, and if that was _all_ he knew he'd have immediately gone to the Guild authorities the instant he got back. So there had to be _something_ else they wanted from him. But he reported to _you_, Miss Lucerne, about your father's death?"

She nodded.

"That's right."

"Why you? Why not the Guild or the milipol or the Lab?"

"Apparently, it was at Father's instruction."

She took out her PDL and called up something, then turned the screen to Ryland.

"His report was delivered in a series of simple-mail messages."

He looked through them, showing Lyon as well. Apparently, the hunter team had been ambushed in the subterranean complex. The team's FOnewm had been gunned down at once, paralyzed and then killed by rifle shots. They'd tried to retreat, but they'd been prevented from using telepipes or Ryuker by a jamming field. Then the ambushers had used explosives to bring the roof down, with only Dorn narrowly escaping. He'd managed to get back to an installed teleporter and retreat to the Central Command Area on the surface, and from there back to _Pioneer 2_.

"'Your father said to tell you, you can dig up his legacy in the past, but it will take the arms of a hunter to unearth it from the ruins,'" he read aloud.

"What does that mean?" Lyon wondered.

"It's certainly cryptic."

"Was Dorn afraid that the simple-mail account was going to be hacked? That's not easy, but if Stane is a Council member he _might_ have unusual resources. But then, maybe not. I remember Gowan telling me once about BEE transmissions having to be snooped while they're being sent, unless of course you get direct access to the sender or recipient's PDL." She cupped her chin, her face assuming a thoughtful mien. "I wasn't paying close attention then, so I'm not entirely sure I followed that explanation correctly."

"Androids can forget things?" Lucerne's curiosity momentarily overcame her focus on her personal problems.

"Oh, yes. Data archival of five-sense information does consume storage space, so we compress, archive, flag, and on occasion delete matters outright. Events are given archival priority, and that updates and changes over time as memories are consulted or ignored. This particular memory was converted to a text-summary with date/time/location indexes but the actual record was deleted so that the memory space could be used for other items. My STM—short-term memory—buffer is in constant flux, you see, holding only 7034 beats' worth of full data. A week and small change, as an organic might say."

Ryland grinned at Lucerne's surprise.

"The main difference I've found between a high-end android and a human or Newman is that androids are much better at knowing their own mind."

"It really is much easier," Lyon agreed. She most definitely did not suffer from organic envy.

"Getting back to the point, though, there's one other explanation for the message being so cryptic. Dr. Lucerne probably knew that there was potential danger—obviously did, if he gave Dorn the message after the initial attack. That presents the possibility of one of the other side capturing a hunter alive and interrogating him or her."

"So the message is cryptic so that if Dorn was captured and the details forced out of him, he wouldn't be able to immediately tell everything."

Ryland nodded at his partner.

"Exactly. Ideally, this references something that only the intended recipient—that's you, Ms. Lucerne—knows the meaning of. Is that the case?"

She looked at them helplessly.

"No, none of it. I can only guess that Father's 'legacy' means either the Psycho-Wand itself or his research data, but the rest of it makes no sense at all to me."

"The rest might be literal," Lyon said.

"You mean, 'the arms of a hunter' meaning it'll take a Hunter's Guild member to get to it?" Lucerne asked.

"Exactly. That is, whatever it is might have been cached in the Ruins under Ragol. That's certainly something from the past, and no one is going to retrieve _anything_ from there if they don't have hunters along."

Ryland winced. He'd only been down to the Ruins—actually, a wrecked spaceship where Dark Falz had been sealed by some ancient civilization—on two missions. That was two more than he wanted, despite the immense cultural and historical interest. If he ever saw another Indi Belra or Gran Sorcerer again it would be too soon; even the simulated ones in the Lab's VR system were more than enough.

"If that's true, though, how did he get it there? He'd have had to send hunters down, apart from his escort team, and we know what happened to them. It's not like he could just send it by data transfer; there'd be nothing there to receive it, so it would have to be a physical cache."

"Unless he had something planted in advance to receive that data transfer," Lyon noted.

"That's an extremely sneaky idea."

"I've been hanging around you long enough to understand how some of these mysteries work."

"Well, I wouldn't rule it out. If Dr. Lucerne knew about Stane's involvement in the matter and the lengths he might go to, then it's entirely possible that he'd plan in advance and..."

The two women looked at him curiously, no surprise given how he'd just trailed off in the middle of the sentence.

"Ryland? Did you think of something?"

"Lyon, when did you sign up for Ms. Lucerne's Guild Quest?"

"Yesterday, at 713.4."

"And this meeting here, how did you set it up? I mean, Ms. Lucerne didn't specify the Blue Grotto for breakfast in her job posting, right?"

"I called her," their client explained, "when the Guild informed me that my quest had been taken. She insisted on working out the specifics by simple-mail, though."

"Which is probably why we don't have a team of killers breathing down our necks right now. But it _was_ enough for Stane to learn that you'd hired hunters and more importantly, whom." He should have made the connection before now; the fact that this was a _new_ job had confused him. Even so, he could only blame his massive personal interest in Ms. Lucerne's job and his lack of sleep for distracting him from the obvious, that in order to surprise him this morning Lyon had to set the Guild Quest up sometime previously.

In other words, when the "message" had been delivered by the assault on Justine, Ryland _had_ commenced working on something. He just hadn't known it yet.

"Ryland, what are you talking about?"

"Someone's been snooping Ms. Lucerne's PDL calls. They identified you, and that led them to me as your partner. The reason I hadn't gotten any sleep last night was that I'd been rousted out of bed by Kendric to go down to the medical center where Justine, his girlfriend, is in a coma. Someone tried to warn me off the job through him."

"Stane went after your friends?" Lucerne gasped.

"My brother, actually."

"My God, where is this going to end? You have to quit, of course; I can't be responsible for—" She broke off in mid-sentence when she saw both hunters shaking their heads at her.

"No, that's not going to happen. There's our pride and professionalism as hunters, of course, but more than that there's the personal level. Stane isn't going to get away with this."

"But your brother..."

"From how Kendric feels, I don't think he's ready to run and hide. On the contrary, given how angry he is I just hope he's willing to take our help when he gets down to the serious business of revenge."


	3. Chapter 3

After they'd addressed the question of their client's personal security, Ryland brought Lyon up to speed on what had happened to Justine.

"I'm very sorry this happened," she told him sympathetically. "I just wanted to surprise you with an interesting job; I didn't want to end up causing you or Kendric trouble."

"It's not your fault, Lyon."

"Of course it isn't," she agreed. "The injury was caused by enemy action. I was apologizing for unintended consequences, not assuming blame."

He chuckled.

"I should know better than to assume you'd suffer from misdirected guilt."

"Well, it isn't impossible. I can only draw conclusions from the available information, so I might very well fall prey to incorrect deductions and so assume a burden I should not, but yes, it is highly unlikely that an overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility or a delusion of having more control over events than I possess would lead me to feel guilt where the known facts would not cause an objective viewer to assign it."

Ryland blinked.

"Was that all one sentence?"

"I believe so."

"I think you have to be an android to keep it straight from one end to the other."

She reached out and flipped his ponytail around so that it tickled his nose; he let out a sharp sneeze.

"Wiseacre Force comments aside, do you have any idea where we should begin? There are a number of threads to this job."

"Indeed. There's the riddle, for one thing, figuring out what Dr. Lucerne left for his daughter. There may be vital evidence, or just important scientific knowledge to preserve. Then there's the question of the surveillance on our client. We're pretty sure her PDL was hacked, so there might be traces a good e-runner could follow up on."

"And on that topic, we owe your brother the courtesy of letting him know what we've found out."

"Yeah, we do, and the Downtown angle is another one to pursue. The attack on Justine and the bar fight where Dorn was killed both happened there, which suggests Stane has some pretty strong contacts on the ship's shady side. Speaking of which, I'm not sure we want to lock ourselves into the idea of Stane's guilt. He might be responsible; from what Ms. Lucerne told us he has the motive and the resources. But there's no proof as yet."

"I agree. If he is innocent in this particular case, it would be foolhardy to invite his attention."

"So, we have: tell Kendric what we can, check details of Dorn's death, investigate the attack on Justine, trace the surveillance on Lucerne's PDL, solve the riddle of Dr. Lucerne's legacy, and identify the person behind Dr. Lucerne's murder."

"That's quite a list." She paused to think. "Would you like me to go with you when you talk to Kendric?"

Ryland nodded.

"Yeah, thanks, I would. We both said some things that...I wouldn't say that we didn't _mean_, but that we didn't really think through. Having a third party along might help keep us civil." He started typing a message onto his PDL. "I'll send him a simple-mail message requesting a meeting. Kendric's gone to ground, which makes a lot of sense under the circumstances; he doesn't want to become the next object lesson."

"And while we're waiting?"

"Let's stick with the Downtown side of things. The only one that we know for a fact knew anything was Barton Dorn. If we can pull on that thread, it might lead somewhere."

"I wonder if Inspector Laleham will be glad to see us?"

The chief homicide investigator of _Pioneer 2_'s military police was not, in fact, glad to see them. His scowl was positively forbidding.

"You two," he snarled combatively. "For Heaven's sake, it's Christmas. Couldn't you hunters leave me alone until 3087, at least?"

Lyon cocked her head to one side in an inquisitive look.

"Why do you not like hunters, Inspector? I don't recall ever having any particular trouble with you."

"It's not personal," he said. "Hell, Lyon, I like you. I'd gladly stand you a beer after work if you drank the stuff. Even your partner annoys me professionally more than personally."

Ryland couldn't quite pull off an offended look at that.

"The problem," Laleham went on, "is that every frickin' time some hunter comes through my door, they completely wreck my day by telling me that some death isn't what it looks like, that a suicide's really a murder, or an accident wasn't accidental, or that a murder really was caused by a conspiracy and the guy we have under lock and key has been framed. Remember how we met?"

He wasn't really expecting an answer to that, just venting, as he showed by not waiting for a reply.

"All right, so what case are you going to turn on its head for me today?"

"Barton Dorn."

"Dorn. Hm...yeah, I know that one. Hunter who got stabbed in a Downtown bar fight. Some of those places are worse than Ragol; he should've gone loaded for Booma." He didn't laugh at his own bad joke, thankfully.

"Do you have any idea who did it?"

Laleham shook his head.

"The ever-popular person or persons unknown. The bartender won't testify to anything—claims he wasn't watching Dorn, doesn't know who was near him, etcetera, etcetera. The same goes for the few people involved in the fight who hadn't cleared out by the time the police showed up. And of course the bar's surveillance systems were completely non-functional. Big surprise there," he said sarcastically.

"That's the truth. One of the services any place in Downtown offers is the comfort and privacy to carry out one's illegal transactions without snoopy video and audio pickups keeping a record of what's going on. I doubt there's three working cameras in the whole area."

"So no one has any idea what happened?" Lyon asked.

Laleham shook his head.

"The fight itself seemed standard enough. Two drunk guys started hitting on a woman, her boyfriend got hot over it, one of the drunks punched him in the face, she punched the guy back, he fell into a table, and it turned into a general riot from there. No idea if Dorn got caught up in it the wrong way or if somebody who didn't like him took advantage of the chaos to express a pointed opinion."

"Did you get a humor upgrade, Inspector? That's the second bad joke you've told since we got here."

"Lyon, there are days I'm convinced my entire job is a bad joke."

Given the number of times his investigations had slammed headalong into the stone wall of intensive strife between _Pioneer 2_'s various power players, including his own military chain of command, he actually had something of a point that Lyon wasn't inclined to dispute.

"What about the possibility that the fight was deliberately staged to give the killer a chance at Dorn?" Ryland suggested.

Laleham sighed.

"I just knew you'd get around to asking that. Yeah, I've got my suspicions, particularly since the bartender said he didn't recognize the people who started the fight and his descriptions were vague as hell."

"I see what you mean. If the bartender is being paid or threatened to keep quiet, it implies the people were up to something more than just beating on each other. And if he's telling the truth, then what are the odds two separate pairs of people should coincidentally wander into an unfamiliar bar in Downtown, where people mostly stick to their regular hangouts unless they're after something, and just _happen_ to start trouble?"

"Bingo."

"So where does that leave us?"

"Up the creek, by my math, with no evidence and nobody to lean on to get some."

"Is anyone upstairs leaning on you or dropping hints about the case either way?"

Laleham shook his head.

"Not so's you'd notice."

"Then we can cross the military off the list of potentially involved parties," Ryland concluded. "If they had a stake, they'd be sniffing around, even if only to verify that you were leaning the way they wanted from you."

"Agreed."

Lyon followed the logic. It made sense, though, since Dr. Lucerne had been a Lab researcher and the suspect, Stane, was with the Administration. Even so, eliminating red herrings was useful, too.

"And in that case, you shouldn't have any problem in sharing the case file with us, since your investigation is at a standstill and you have no special interest of your superiors which duty would compel you to protect," Ryland summed up, grinning broadly. Laleham just stared at him for a long moment, then gave up with a deep sigh.

"Fine. Here you go." He stabbed a few buttons on his console, making one of the screens on his wall light up with the details. "I knew this was going to be a bad day," he muttered under his breath.

Lyon and Ryland looked at the screen. There appeared to be little more to the story than Laleham had told them. Dorn had been stabbed in the back, a knife-blade angled upwards into the heart. He'd also taken a number of blows consistent with being stomped on by heavy boots. That could have been done by the milling crowd in the fight, but might also have been identical since at least one such story had caused sufficient skull fractures and brain damage to make revival impossible despite an emergency Moon Atomizer use by the response team.

"They'd have to make sure," Lyon commented. "Anything over twenty minutes dead is probably going to cause a revival failure no matter how neat the original wound was, but if the milipol were called quickly by some well-meaning bystander, ambulance response time once the police called them in would be under three minutes."

"I agree. Photon suppressors in the bar made his frame non-functional, so the knife only had to penetrate flesh, not defensive fields." Ryland glanced at Laleham. "That's not usual for a Downtown bar, is it? The Guild deck has Photon suppressors in place due to the congregation of armed hunters, but relatively few businesses have them—and they're expensive, besides."

The Inspector nodded.

"There's a couple of high-end places that have them, clubs that cater to high rollers with low business, but the fact is the things are too expensive, both for purchase and power cost, for most places in Downtown."

"Which Dorn would know. A Hunter's training in close combat plus his superior equipment would probably make him feel relatively secure in dealing with Downtown thugs."

Lyon agreed with her partner's conclusion.

"It sounds more and more like Dorn was lured onto the killing ground. There are too many needed coincidences for any of this to be accidental," she said. "Who owns this bar?"

"Owns" wasn't the correct term, of course. _Pioneer 2_ was a spaceship of the Coral government, technically owned by the Ten-Nation Alliance that had sponsored its creation and managed through its increasingly independent local arms, the Administration and the military. Private parties didn't actually _own_ real estate or buildings on the ship, but instead held lease rights that functioned more or less the same way.

"The leaseholder for Falcone's is _Pioneer 2_ Enterprise, Property Holding Division," Laleham said after consulting his recorder. P2E was a joint venture created by a half-dozen mid-sized Coral companies to represent their shared investment in the new settlement and was, ironically, one of the larger corporate groups on the ship, coming in behind only Weinstine and Nevers.

"That's a dead end; obviously they have a subtenant for the bar. Is that in your records, or would we have to go to P2E?" Ryland asked.

Laleham shook his head.

"Sorry; we'd only have that detail if it related to a particular investigation. Otherwise the sublease is a private contract between P2E and the tenant. The government billing for utility charges, taxation, and so on, all goes to _Pioneer 2_ Enterprise and they're responsible to the Administration for it."

"I see. It makes me wonder, though. Staging a scene is easier if you have on-site controls, and installing photon suppressors in a shady bar suggests that someone uses the place for more than serving cheap booze. Is that why you asked about the owner, Lyon?"

"Exactly. It suggests that one of the criminal syndicates might be involved. If Falcone's is an underworld bar, either the crooks who own it are part of it, or else someone got their permission to carry the killing out on their turf."

"Maybe not if it was just a knifing, but the whole big production number, yeah, I follow you there," Laleham contributed. "You want me to check with some of our informants?"

"No, thank you," Lyon said. "We don't know quite how high up this goes, and official questions have a way of getting around."

He pulled a sour face.

"Yeah, no arguing that."

"Besides, we have our own informant as to underworld business. He should be able to tell us who's behind Falcone's."

"All right, then. Good luck."

"Thanks."

"And by the way..."

"Yes, Inspector?"

"If you should happen to, in the course of your investigation, turn up the people who stuck a knife in Dorn, you might consider having them arrested? It'd make for a nice change."

~X X X~

"You know, Ryland," Lyon said as their aerocar sailed along the traffic channel as it wove between the buildings, "that remark wasn't exactly fair. We brought him in on the end of the case when you and I met, and even though the one we were after chose suicide over arrest, we did at least try. And we turned over the White Day bomber to the milipol when we solved that case. We've never played fast and loose with the law." She folded her arms over her chest in an affronted attitude.

"I don't think he meant it personally. Hunter business—particularly when it runs into politics—so often ends with him getting nothing but an 'unsolved' flag at the end of his case file."

"If he's supposed to be a good investigator, then he ought to be able to tell one bunch of hunters from another."

Ryland shook his head.

"And here I expected that you'd be the one defending Laleham. We started out that way."

"I'm not the one who sank into personal remarks."

Ryland chuckled, surprising her.

"What's so funny?"

"You, whenever your ego gets its back up."

She ran a quick diagnostic, noting that in point of fact her pride and sense of self _were_ prompting her pique, but that they were within tolerance levels for her personality. After all, organics highly valued their unique individuality as a person and how it separated them from similar others.

Still, it was a personal matter, so after making the necessary notations for her interpersonal relationship with Laleham (basically a file note that said "he annoyed me on X date/time by doing Y which bothered me Z much") she returned her attention to the upcoming meeting with Kendric.

He'd replied back to Ryland while they were in their meeting with the Inspector, giving a time and place for their meeting. He hadn't picked one of his usual Downtown haunts, which was logical since the other side knew at least some of his habits and wouldn't be pleased to learn he was meeting with his brother and hadn't been warned off. Lyon was pleased that he hadn't chosen a restaurant as well; watching organics eat got old quickly and she always felt like a bit of an outsider when she just sat there without anything to do while they followed the social ritual of bonding over meals.

They docked their aerocar in the parking area and took an elevator up to their destination, one of the city's shopping arcades. This one was set on an extended platform between two buildings, with rows of shops on both sides as well as holo-displays, and advertising screens. In the center was an octagonal hole through which scrolled a column of holographic images that rose with eye-catching images. Shoppers wove in and out among the benches and fountains that dotted the path, and aerocars flew by above and, if one peered over the rail between stores, below.

Kendric had said he'd meet them by the second fountain south of the central display (south in this case meaning "aft"; north had been defined as "towards the bow of the ship" for the citizens' ease in use of descriptive language), so the hunters kept their eyes open as they walked along. Lyon spotted him before Ryland, since the precision of her perception in matching what she saw to her memories didn't get as distracted by the rudimentary disguise he wore: a black wig and wraparound single-lens sunshades reminiscent of the visors some human Rangers wore.

He was leaning against one of the arc-shaped light posts that arched over the arcade, seemingly watching the world go by with an air of sullen superiority but really keeping an eye out for trouble. He straightened up as they approached.

"So, Donny, you say you've got a lead on what the guys who went after Justine were trying to tell you?"

"And hello to you too," Lyon said. Kendric's eyes flicked towards her.

"Sorry. Big bro's probably told you why I'm not feeling really sociable right now."

She nodded. The apology was grudging, barely even qualifying as one, but she believed he meant it.

"I've got a pretty good idea," Ryland answered his initial question. "Lyon signed us up for a Guild Quest yesterday as a surprise for me. I didn't know about it until this morning."

"As a _surprise_? You mean like a Christmas present or something?"

"Actually, yes. The job concerns the research of a Lab scientist who was trying to prove that what we call Photon is the same form of energy that in the past was called magic, and as a corollary show that some of those old legends need to be seen in a new light as history rather than myths."

Kendric shook his head.

"Whatever floats it for you. C'mon, let's walk."

They fell into stride together, heading north. _Pioneer 2_'s citizens were an eclectic bunch, but Lyon still couldn't help but think that her orange-and-black android carapace, Ryland's Force robe, and Kendric's street look stood out when grouped together as they were. She kept a careful watch for possible surveillance.

"So you're sure about this job being what you're supposed to drop?"

"I am, as much as I can be. It's the only thing I have on hand, and there's already been human opposition who used lethal force. There's even a Downtown connection: one of the hunters on the scientist's team was murdered in an apparently staged fight in a bar called Falcone's."

Kendric stopped, grabbing Ryland's sleeve.

"Falcone's? Justine was attacked just outside there."

"You think there's a connection?"

"I don't know. Her dealer...he works outside on the corner there and hops inside when he's hungry or thirsty. I though that's what she was doing there, but maybe not."

"Even if that was the reason, if the other side has some level of control over the bar or its vicinity, it might explain why the attack happened there instead of, say, following her somewhere less public."

"That's a point."

Kendric turned away from Ryland and resumed walking.

"So I guess this means you've accepted this job, if you're hunting up leads."

"Did you not want me to?"

"Does it make a difference?"

"Yes, it does."

"You'd really turn your back on a job that you consider it a _gift_ to work on if I asked?" To say that Kendric's tone was disbelieving didn't come close to describing it.

"No, I wouldn't."

"Didn't think so."

"Not like that, not out of hand. I've got my reasons for pursuing this Guild Quest, ones that are quite different than just my interest in Dr. Lucerne's research."

"Like what?" Kendric's lip curled as he asked it.

"The most obvious one is that someone threatened, actually harmed, my family in order to convince me to abandon this job. My first instinct is to find out who that was and make very sure that they regret their decision. That ought to be enough by itself."

Its adequacy as a reason for pursuing a quest might be up for debate, but not its effect on Kendric. He all but jerked to a stop in his tracks.

"What are you—"

"As you've said, this was a message to me, and so I'm the one who should be responding to it. But you're the one caught in the middle, you and yours already suffering the consequences. So if you'd rather I drop the business and walk away, I'll listen to your reasoning."

Kendric jammed his hands into his jacket pockets, apparently to restrain any nervous gestures he might find himself making. He was obviously flustered, rewriting the events and emotions of the past day in his head, fighting to overcome his initial unjustified anger at Ryland that still colored his perceptions. It was much easier for androids, of course. Lyon could identify the source of his emotions—the observations that had caused them—and simply adjust accordingly when new information altered her perceptions of the past. For an organic, though, at least part of the processing was happening on an automatic, subconscious level, and the changes between how they felt before and after the change in perceptions were not clear-cut and easy. And with siblings, a lifetime's worth of issues were tangled together.

So Lyon decided to offer Kendric a hand getting over the hurdle.

"I think that even I know Kendric well enough to tell what his answer will be, though."

She couldn't tell if the young man's eyes turned to her or not behind the sunshades. He did take the out she offered, though, smiling wolfishly.

"Hell, yeah. If Justine could, she'd be out looking to claw the eyes out of whoever did this, and I'm sure not going to let her down by weaseling. So if you're going after these bastards, big bro, then you'd better let me help."

Ryland adjusted his spectacles.

"In that case, I'd better bring you up to speed, then, because we've got work for you."


	4. Chapter 4

Ryland gave his brother the abbreviated version of Revelle Lucerne's story, finishing up just about the time they reached the north end of the arcade.

"So you need some e-work from me on the tap somebody's got on the lady's PDL, and Downtown info on who the players might be."

"As a starting point, at least."

"I see. Second part's easy; Falcone's is on Slashers turf. That's a mostly-Newman street gang; they go in for a lot of technoflash. The area used to be controlled by Hideki Takamura, but from what I hear he got taken out by 32nd WORKS before they belly-upped and the locals ended up picking up the pieces."

The hunters looked at him curiously.

"A gang?" Ryland asked. "Are they anyone special?" Back on Coral, some gangs were as good as criminal cartels, with operations that ran to multiple cities and business profiles that matched or exceeded those of traditional syndicates. But that was Coral, and it wasn't likely that such a gang could have gotten enough of its members in among the colonists to become a major factor.

The answer verified their thoughts.

"Nah, just a bunch of local street fighters. They basically take a percentage off the skin trade, chem-dealers, and wire merchants in the area, do the protection racket, and hire themselves out for strong-arm stuff. I figure they've got maybe three months before they either have to join up with a bigger fish or get eaten by one."

"That changes things, then," Ryland said. "Loose local control of the area means that the bar's probably not important in the way we thought."

"Not the ownership, you mean?" Lyon asked.

"Right. But the gang could be a lead. A beating and a knifing sound like 'strong-arm stuff' to me." He thought for a moment. "Kendric, was Justine's visit to her dealer a regular appointment?"

"No, 'cause she was trying to cut the wire, at least sometimes. She'd really stretch out her supply when she was, though she'd burn through 'em pretty fast otherwise." Wire merchants sold preprogrammed fantasy scenarios to their addicts, which would self-delete after a few plays. They were hard-coded to chips most of the time, to make it harder for a net-dancer to undo that part of the code. It wasn't impossible, but it required time and talent and was only one fantasy per program anyway, so the damage potential didn't cut too deeply into anyone's profits.

"So essentially, the people sending the message couldn't have known off the top of their heads to have someone waiting for Justine at that place and time."

"Surveillance," Lyon agreed. "The watcher saw her come out alone, called ahead, and had someone waiting for her."

"You haven't been home since then, have you?" Ryland asked.

"No way. I figured if they knew about me, they'd be watching to see if I was going along with their program."

"Which you already were figuring you weren't, because going to ground is a pretty big tip-off that you were at least thinking about not doing what they said. But maybe you're having second thoughts. Maybe you've decided this is too big, too risky for you, and there's no reason to stick out your neck for my sake."

"Hey, what the hell?" Kendric's temper flared. "What do you take me for?"

"A decoy, playing the part," Lyon said. "Which if he wasn't so impressed by his own cleverness, he'd have said outright."

"You take all the fun out of it."

She shrugged.

"A good partner keeps her allies' feet on the ground."

"So basically, I'm gonna go home, like I'd had second thoughts about playing it cute. And while I'm plopping my hind end in a chair, you're going to be seeing who's watching me do that."

Ryland smirked.

"Exactly. While we're doing that, Lyon, why don't you head over to Falcone's and lean on Justine's wire merchant? He'd either have seen the thugs or actually got warned off by them."

"All right, but shouldn't the jobs be reversed? I'm better at spotting surveillance since I'm not as vulnerable to camouflage and other tricks."

"Yes, but you're also better at intimidation, and by a considerable amount."

"Guy in a dress doesn't have a lot of street cred," Kendric agreed.

"At least not until he torches the first person who laughs," Lyon noted. Ryland was quite devastating in battle with his brutal waves of techniques. "But I see your point."

"The other good thing about going back to my res-unit is that I can get my hands on my equipment to get started on the e-side of things. Can't run without a track, right?" He described the wire merchant to Lyon.

"We'll touch base by simple-mail so we can agree when and where to reconnect or if we should follow up on anything else separately," Ryland told her. Lyon nodded.

"All right. And you two, try and keep an eye on each others' backs while I'm not there to do it for you."

The brothers looked at one another.

"She always such a worrywart?" Kendric asked, jerking a thumb towards Lyon.

"She can't help it. She's programmed that way."

"Men!"

~X X X~

Although she'd warned the organics to look out, it was Lyon herself who kept a close watch on her surroundings, diverting an added level of her processing power to threat analysis, fields of fire, and tracking and drawing conclusions about the Downtown denizens she moved among. From sleazers and gang members to beggars, wireheads, and addicts, everyone here had some reason, personal or external, why they were drawn to the slum rather than taking part in the ordinary life of _Pioneer 2_'s society. From what she'd observed, it was hardly a phenomenon exclusive to Downtown. The dynamics of predator and prey, users and used, were in play among all levels of society, from soldiers and officials to traders, scientists, and, yes, hunters.

It seemed to be a universal truth of the human (or newman or android) condition, and she wondered what it would take to get people to rally together and strive for a better life for all. The environmental deterioration on Coral, the trek to a new world, the sudden destruction of the _Pioneer 1_ settlement, none of these things had affected the usual business of greed, selfishness, and treachery. Maybe the extremist fringe was right that the only way to truly cleanse society was to blow the whole damn thing up and start over, a lunatic solution that ignored the fact the reason _to_ cleanse society was for the good of the people _in_ it.

That was a common problem with idealists, she'd noted. They fought so hard, devoted so much energy and thought to their cause that they ended up forgetting _why_ the cause had existed in the first place. So did freedom fighters trying to throw off a tyrant's yoke become terrorists slaughtering everyone and religious movements bringing enlightenment turn into inquisitions slaughtering the infidel.

She flagged for later diagnostics the apparent link her mind had made between enhanced security perception and philosophical musings on social engineering, then set the train of thought aside as she approached the street corner.

The man Kendric had described as Eddy was there, under a light pole whose lamp had been blasted out by weapons fire. Unlike on planetside cities, where such lights would be extinguished by criminals seeking cover, the ambient light of the shipboard city made the act largely symbolic, vandalism as entertainment.

Eddy was human, tall and thin, with brown hair worn long to fall across the shoulders of his tan duster. The coat, in combination with his broad-brimmed hat ornamented by a band of beaten metal discs, suggested mystery, perhaps even magic. That was what the wire merchant was selling: a few moments of magic in among the dreary facts of existence. The fact that his magic was illusory, addictive, and ultimately destructive did not concern him.

He smiled as Lyon approached him, showing too many teeth.

"Hello, my fine lady. What may I do for you today?"

"You are Eddy?"

"That I am."

"I'm looking to make a purchase."

"I don't get many android customers." An android could hook up to a hotwire fantasy, but since they would experience the sensory input as data, they wouldn't suffer any of the effects of wireburn. However, there were relatively few who cared to bother, because they could also easily perceive all the differences between the programmed fantasy and reality, and almost always found the virtual world lacking.

"You came highly recommended."

"Did I, now? Mind if I ask by whom?"

"Justine Trent."

That did it. The flash of recognition in his eyes, but more than that the apprehension. He'd known his customers, but here he knew enough that something bad had gone down in connection with this one.

"Oh, good," Lyon said. "I don't need to waste my time with long-winded explanations."

He spun and bolted, rushing down the street. Lyon gave chase at once, running smoothly. One advantage of being an android, of course, was that she didn't have to worry about getting tired from continued effort or exercise, but while that was useful over the long haul she still pushed her speed. Eddy no doubt knew this warren like the back of his hand and could duck into some bolthole if she gave him a chance. He ducked down an alley, but she was going faster and dove at him in a flying tackle. Her shoulder crashed hard into his lower back, making him grunt in pain, and she closed her arms around him to make sure he was dragged down. Lyon got up first, fisting her grip in the back of his coat.

"Hey, wha's' all this?" muttered a bleary, sleep-drunk voice. A beggar in ragged clothes was curled up against the wall in a shelter made from a packing crate, and the noise of the collision had woken him up.

"I beg your pardon," Lyon said, "but this is a private conversation. Would you mind giving us a few moments alone?"

"Wha—? Hey, this is my—"

She handed him ten meseta.

"For the inconvenience."

"Okay, but don't you touch anything," the beggar said, pushing himself to his feet and scrambling off. Lyon couldn't help but smile at the encounter.

"Now, Eddy, about that conversation..."

She pulled him upright, but instead of giving in peacefully, he twisted his wrist, dropping a knife into his palm from a spring-loaded sheath kept up his sleeve. Eddy whirled, slashing out at the android's side, but although the non-Photon blade would do little more than scratch her armor, she didn't even allow it to connect, driving her elbow down hard into his forearm. He dropped the knife, and she kicked it skittering down the alley before hammering her knee up hard into his guts. Eddy gagged, and she grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him hard into the alley wall.

"That wasn't very nice. A girl might get to feeling unwanted with a reception like that."

"W—why are you after me? I didn't tell anybody anything!"

_Ah_, Lyon thought. _He appears to be suffering from a misapprehension._

"I see. But you've realized already that there's only one way to insure that will remain so or else you wouldn't be running from me." She waited a pause to let that knowledge hit his conscious mind, confirming what his subconscious fear was telling him. "Luckily for you, silence is the last thing that I want from you."

The problem now, of course, was that if he was that afraid of whomever had told him to keep his mouth shut, he might be inclined to obey them. There were a number of ways to play it out to try and break down that resistance; she'd have to wait and see which direction to take things.

"You're...you're not..."

"I'm asking the questions here," she snapped. "Your job is to give answers about the attack on Justine Trent."

"I don't know anything! She hasn't made a buy from me in days!"

Lyon sighed.

"And yet you ran away at the mention of her name. Eddy, can you really be so dumb as to think anyone at all would believe you?" She paused again, then glared straight into his eyes. Most organics found the blank blue stare of her eye-lights to be unnerving in their cold, obviously inhuman look, and Eddy was no exception. He tried to look away, but she released his coat with one hand and cupped his chin to hold his head in place. "You get that one for free, because it was so pathetic," she said. "From now on, the lies are going to cost you."

"I...I don't know anything, I said. I wasn't even there!"

"Yes, Eddy, I know. But you were watching, weren't you? And you're afraid that someone knows it."

She let that sink in for half a tenth-beat.

"They warned you off your corner, didn't they? And they had either the rep or the muscle to get you to move it. But you hung around and watched, maybe from inside the bar, because you figured that it might give you an angle."

"I...I..."

"Only now, you're asking yourself all kinds of questions. You know Justine by name, so you know some of who she runs with. And you're wondering what made her a target for this kind of rough stuff. And the answers you're thinking up are starting to worry you, because they're out of your league. Rather than cut yourself in for a percentage, you think they'll cut you _out_. Am I doing all right so far?"

He didn't answer. She gave him a couple of forceful pats, not quite slaps, on the cheek.

"Eddy, this is where you speak up."

"Y-yeah..."

An affirmative answer. Admittedly, it was Lyon who'd done all the talking so far, but even so it was a good sign. He could lie and bluster all day if he was of a mind to and they wouldn't get anywhere, so this was definitely a step in the right direction.

"Good! See how easy that was? And now it's time for you to really earn your stripes. Who was it?"

He didn't say anything, a cold sweat starting to mar his face with its sheen.

"Come on, now, it's an easy question. Who warned you off the corner, and who attacked Justine? Names, descriptions, affiliations, I'll take it all. I'm a very curious girl."

"I can't! They'll kill me!" Eddy stammered.

She punched him in the stomach, then stepped back as he vomited up his breakfast all over the already-fouled pavement. Lyon straightened him up and pushed him back against the wall.

"Why does everyone always insist on doing everything the hard way?" she sighed. Still, some good had come of it. In stepping back from her face-to-face stance, she'd widened her field of perception and was therefore able to see the man and two women stepping into the mouth of the alley with weapons in hand.

"Well," she said brightly, "maybe your friends there can offer some explanations for you."

The sizzling sound of gunfire filled the alley.

~X X X~

Kendric Ryland felt the itch between his shoulder blades as he walked to the door of his residence unit. He hated the feeling. As a net-dancer, he was involved in illegal computer activities regularly, so he was used to covering his tracks, but that was different. That was about making sure his _work_ couldn't be traced, that his electronic fingerprints weren't leading the milipol or a corporate security squad back at him. He wasn't used to being the target of _physical_ surveillance, having to take special precautions with his meat body.

Working in Downtown and living on its fringes, of course, made one security-conscious by necessity. There were plenty of desperate people who might assault and rob a man who wasn't careful, to say nothing of gangs who got their kicks by roughing up or worse anyone who was too weak to resist or offended their eyes.

This wasn't the same.

This was organized pursuit. Eyes looking out for him. E-runners sifting through his datatrails. He wasn't peripheral to someone else's operation as a hired hand, but the personal focus of enemy action.

He was still furious at his brother for getting him into this, that anger seething just under the surface, but he also knew that it wasn't Donovan's _fault_. Years of frustration at the older brother who'd accompanied their successful father after the divorce, gotten the educational opportunities that had led him down the Force's path, didn't go away that easily. It was more of the same: life handed Donovan all the good things, while Kendric got dumped on, like all the bad luck allotted to the two of them had been shoved over to the younger brother. It was Kendric who'd had to watch his mother deteriorate from wireburn, watching a light habit that had been his father's impetus for ending the marriage and getting the magistrate to find heavily for him in the property settlement and alimony (despite his coldness and constant obsession with work being what had led her to seek solace in virtual fantasies in the first place) get worse and worse into full addiction.

The divorce had happened when Kendric was ten. By the time he was twelve, she could no longer hold a decent job. By the time he was fifteen, she was too far gone to even whore, a bedridden cripple. He'd had to scrape and scavenge to keep a roof over their heads, bring back food. A knack for computers that might have been the foundation for a decent career became a full-time job on the gray side. She'd died when he was sixteen and he'd signed up for _Pioneer 2_ a month later, hoping to put it all behind him in settling a new planet.

And then he'd found that his brother was on the same ship, a respected and successful hunter.

No, Kendric was old enough, smart enough to know Donovan wasn't to _blame_ for any of it. The older Ryland hadn't made _choices_ to put Kendric in danger or cause problems in his life. He knew that. But that knowledge didn't make any of it easy or comfortable to swallow.

And now, something as simple as walking into his own residence building was a hazard.

He took the elevator up to his floor and uncoded his lock, then went inside. Nothing seemed out of place; he tended to be disorderly and Justine, who only stayed over about a third of the time anyway, was scarcely better. Dirty laundry, remnants of take-out food, and bits and pieces of electronics were scattered about. Ironically, the disarray made it harder for someone to search the place without leaving traces; unless they were an android it was hard to remember which clothes were piled on the chair in what order, and even for one virtually impossible to get them back _just so_.

No, his res-unit hadn't been searched. Why would it? There was no suspicion Kendric knew anything about Donovan's job, no reason to think along those lines. A planted device was possible, though, a bug, maybe—or something nastier. He made a quick but careful inspection for explosives, checking out nooks and crannies where one might have been slipped. Only then did he fire up his electronics suite. A planted camera he figured he'd have found, and an audio bug, well, all he had to do was keep his mouth shut until Donovan or more likely Lyon could scan for it.

As for the computer, though, if the other side figured they could snoop _him_, well, they had another think coming.

It was there, all right, a trace program set to look at any attempt by his machine to access the net. It wasn't subtle, even allowing for the fact that he was specifically looking out for such a thing.

It made Kendric suspicious.

Was this really the caliber of the opposition? He was good, but he didn't delude himself into thinking that he was the Red Ring Rico of net-dancers. This program was way too clumsily crafted, especially when its target was known to have hacking skills. The crudest end of street work.

He suspected a trap. This program could be a Trojan horse, ready to explode, or a decoy to make him _think_ he'd avoided the trace attempt while a better-hidden program lurked in wait.

Yes, he most definitely would be taking care. He began to investigate, probing cautiously. If it _was_ a trap, it would no doubt be designed to engage when a standard stealth utility was put into effect, so he didn't try that just yet. Instead he carefully probed the trace code to make sure that's all it was, and only then walled it off, before expanding outwards in his search, looking for another layer to the espionage, a ghost indicating a second level of e-surveillance. He found nothing.

Nothing!

It didn't make any sense. Snooping programs like the one he'd found were fine for tagging civilians. It was good enough to fool generic, automatic security 'ware. But anyone who knew enough about him to know Donavan was his brother and Justine his girl would know that Kendric was an e-runner with some positive rep. This kind of trace was an insult to his skills!

Still confused and a touch annoyed, he broke the trace's shell and started to hack _it_, trying to find where it sent the data it was supposed to collect. This was a little harder than spotting it or concealing his activities from it, but not by much. That was when he got his second surprise.

It was a dead end.

The trace was designed to drop any information gathered as a file into a social node, a kind of online board. That could work as a "dead drop," where someone could come along and pick up the file later, but the problem was that that kind of thing was pointless. And there was no one snooping that location or with some kind of automatic alert to provide realtime feedback. It just didn't make sense. As an electronic surveillance technique, it served no purpose. Not only was it no threat and easy to avoid, if by some miracle it caught him, it wouldn't even cause him any trouble.

So why have it at all?

The question bothered him. Although young, he'd already learned a lesson that his brother and the hunters knew well: when enemy actions didn't seem to make sense, that usually meant the news was going to be very bad when all did become clear. Knowing that, he thought about it a little harder.

The trace was useless as e-surveillance. It wasn't a booby trap. That meant it could only be some kind of decoy. But there hadn't been anything lying in wait, either, no second level of electronic security unless it was way above his ability to detect—in which case no decoy would have been needed. The only thing the trace had cost him was time.

_Time!_

The answer came to him in a flash.

The trace program _was_ a decoy. But it wasn't designed to set him up for further electronic warfare. Its purpose was exactly what it had accomplished: to make Kendric waste his time at the computer checking and double-checking until he'd probed its mysteries. The other side had known that he wouldn't be able to resist trying to solve the puzzle, because of simple self-preservation if curiosity didn't turn the trick on its own.

And all the while he'd been wasting time.

Time during which he _wasn't_ doing anything important online—gathering information or sending it on to someone else.

Time which the people watching his res-unit—the surveillance he was here to flush, so he should have been more aware of it!—could use to move in to take him...or just take him _out_.

A decoy, yes, but not for the net, for the real world.

The whole picture crashed through his head in an instant, but not fast enough. On its heels came the hissing swish from behind Kendric of the residence unit's door opening.

~X X X~

_A/N: Those who know my older fics at PSOworld will have caught the reference to Hideki Takamura's death in "Ghosts of the Past."_


	5. Chapter 5

Lyon was surprised that the newcomers opened fire at once without warnings, threats, or macho posturing. That did not, however, mean that she was caught off-guard. Even as they had been swinging their guns up into firing position, she was lunging backwards, pulling Eddy with her by the coat, swinging him out to her right so he hit the ground next to her instead of sprawling on top.

She rolled to her feet, drawing her railgun as she did so, arming the Photon driver in mid-roll so that by the time she was upright again the red sighting bar was in place and the weapon ready to fire. The attackers' shots had gouged harmlessly off the building wall and the deck surface of the alley, and Lyon fired at once. Her shot took the male enemy in the wrist, half-severing his hand; he screamed and dropped the handgun.

That left one other gun-wielder, a human woman with short violet hair and luminescent gel-ink tattoos on her bare arms, her thin body looking even thinner in her baggy black vest and military-style pants. She swung her gun towards Lyon, tilted to the side in her grasp the way RAmarls liked to do, and kept firing. One shot went wide, while the other hit Lyon in the side just under the armpit, but that one was stopped harmlessly by her Photon-enhanced armor.

Lyon put one shot through the woman's shoulder and one through her abdomen, dropping her out of the fight.

Both of the two people she'd shot had taken potentially fatal injuries. She knew, though, that it was only potential: a dose of Monomate, which she carried with her, would stabilize the woman and cure the man outright. There had been no hesitation in firing to incapacitate, just a calm assessment of the threat they posed, their potential involvement in other crimes, and an appropriate response. She didn't think it was because she was an android; rather, it was because she was a _professional_, an experienced hunter who knew her business and had been in similar situations many times before. Facing violent attack, running threat assessments, gauging the goals of the situation, and executing an appropriate response without letting shock and fear slow her down was a learned process for her as much as it was for an organic.

The remaining street-fighter hadn't had a chance to develop this professional coldness. She launched herself, screaming with rage, at the android who'd just dropped her two companions. This one didn't have a gun; her right forearm was sheathed in a chrome gauntlet from which protruded two hooked blades of green Photon energy. A claw was usually, even among hunters, more often a weapon of intimidation than combat. The few who used them seriously tended to be Newmen, and this woman was no exception: a lithe, slender woman with a gymnast's build and pale yellow braids. Her blue halter-top and extremely brief shorts left a lot of skin exposed, but there was a strange sheen to it, like the ripple-effect afterimage of Photon camouflage was molded to her body.

In other words, she was wearing a Photon frame.

Lyon saw and absorbed these details instantly, realizing that an incapacitating shot might well be impossible; even a weak frame might deflect enough power to make the impact bruising instead of wounding. Instead, she switched out the railgun for a melee weapon, her Durandal saber. The long, narrow blade was still powering up when the claw-woman made her first slash, and Lyon was forced to pivot out of the way. Blonde Braids charged past but corrected quickly, sweeping her hand around on a backswing swipe. Lyon's saber had activated by then, though, and she parried, catching the claw inside the bend in the blades and swinging it up and out. The position left the woman's entire right side exposed, and Lyon kicked her, hard, below the ribs. The Newman stumbled, already off-balance, and this allowed Lyon to gauge the effectiveness of the frame: it had reduced the effect of her kick from something that would have injured to the force of a solid shove.

But then, that's why she had the Durandal.

Lyon pressed her advantage, the saber being a much easier weapon to bring into the fray than the claw. Blonde Braids barely recovered in time to parry the android's first blow, an overhand cut that made her raise her arm, but this left her exposed as Lyon whirled her blade around and down, slicing at the Newman's knees. The power of the saber was too much for the frame to handle; even with some of the effect blunted there was still enough energy to rip deep gashes across the woman's legs. Her left leg buckled, making her drop to one knee, and Lyon slashed hard into the claw's gauntlet base. Sparks flew, and a second strike wrecked the weapon beyond repair. Its blades winked out, and Lyon brought the Durandal's hilt up under her chin and knocked the woman over onto her back. Lyon was about to put the tip of the blade to her throat, when the Newman fired a Zonde technique right into her face.

This came as a serious surprise. While the Newman race as a whole had a natural aptitude for Photon manipulation via techniques—it was one of their defining attributes, as much a part of the fundamental genetic alterations that made them Newmen as their pointed ears—Lyon didn't expect to find the talent in a street fighter. Money or luck could bring decent equipment into Downtown in terms of weapons and armor, but few of its denizens had the background, the training, to know how to master and use techniques even if they got their hands on a disk with the relevant information. The "street Force" was a fictional archetype of entertainment Net broadcasts rather than something real.

The electric jolt blasting through Lyon's body was quite real, though, and she was knocked a step back. Blonde Braids hit Lyon with another one, jarring her further back, but worse yet the electrical blast to her systems was channeled down core pathways. Automatic defenses were tripped, isolating the current from her mind and her body's main control, but the effect was a paralytic shock. She could only watch helplessly as the Newman scrambled for one of the dropped guns and scooped it up, whirling not towards Lyon, but Eddy.

The wire merchant had already started to move during the first exchange of blows between Lyon and Blonde Braids; he scrambled to his feet and had just started running again when the Newman fired. The shot took him in the back; his body arched and went down, tumbling into a fall like a puppet with its strings cut. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she rolled onto her side and took aim, firing again, and blasted a shot through Eddy's hat into the head beneath, ending any chance at resuscitation. Grinning now, she rolled over and half-sat up, pointing the gun at the shock-paralyzed android.

Had she been able, Lyon would have winced as the three shots, coming quickly one after another, hammered into her. The hunter's armor, though, was not shut off by the shock effect, and the majority of the damage from the low-grade handgun's shots was stopped; what got through was minor and strictly cosmetic as her injury diagnostics told her at once. When her systems reengaged, she stepped forward and slashed the weapon out of Blonde Braids' hand, then rammed the Durandal's point down into the frame's control module, disabling her protection. She tried another technique, but a swift kick to the side interrupted her before she could launch it and tossed the Newman over onto her belly. Lyon quickly slapped a set of plasmarings on her, locking her hands behind her back and nulling her ability to use techniques via the security device.

"Too late, tin can," Blonde Braids mocked her. "The weasel's dead. Now you'll never get him to talk."

"True," Lyon observed. "But on the other hand, I now have _three_ people to question instead of one, people who are actually part of whatever's going on than just witnesses. So while the loss of life is regrettable in the abstract, from the point of view of my job, your actions have actually improved my position."

Blonde Braids didn't have a wisecrack in response to that statement.

~X X X~

Kendric's hand flew underneath the desk, finding the butt of the charged autogun he kept taped there in case of emergencies. A quick yank freed the weapon and he powered it up while swinging around to see what the situation was and look for cover.

The figures of two men filled the open doorway.

"So, the little mouse decided to creep out of his hole at last," sneered one. He was a human, around Kendric's age, with solid muscle under his chrome-accented black outfit. Luminescent-gel tattoos were inked into his shaved scalp. He carried a mechgun, a rapid-firing Photon weapon that hunters usually used in pairs. The second man was even bigger, with an eight-inch-high Mohawk and chrome-plated reinforced knuckles.

"Guess he didn't know enough to leave the cheese alone."

With his autogun, Kendric actually had an advantage over the two street fighters. That was in the abstract, though. While he was familiar with the weapon from target practice, he'd never fired it at a living target. He'd been in his share of scraps, but never one where he'd deliberately pointed a lethal weapon at an enemy and pulled the trigger.

The two Slashers didn't look like they had that problem.

"Yeah, well, this mouse bites back," he said with a bravado he didn't feel. He was crouched on one knee behind the dubious cover of a chair, the gun in a two-handed grip pointing towards the thugs. "I'd suggest you get the hell out of here if you don't want to be carried out on a stretcher."

"Kid thinks he's tough with his popgun," the chromed Slasher sneered, bringing up his mechgun. He never got to shoot, because a blast of fire took him in the back and blew him off his feet to lie very still.

"No, he thinks, correctly, that he has someone watching his back."

Kendric couldn't actually see Donovan, as the Force was up the hall instead of standing right behind the Slashers, but his voice carried through the open door. The thug, who was still standing, whirled to his left to face the newcomer. He was in a hopeless position and knew it, caught between the tech-slinging Donovan and Kendric's autogun. To his credit, he _tried_ to run, but was dropped in his tracks by a Zonde technique.

"I guess you found the one watching this place?" Kendric asked as his brother helped him haul the two gangers inside.

"It wasn't hard. He was sitting in an aerocar docked across the way with these two in the back. I suspect he's reported in by now."

"He got away?"

"I didn't go after him. I was at the other end of the block when I spotted them, and these two seemed like a higher priority."

Kendric didn't say anything for a long moment. If it hadn't been for their fight he'd have made some sassy remark about Donovan getting slow in his old age to not take both groups, but the idea died on his tongue. He had a feeling that it wouldn't be taken the right way.

"Thanks," he settled on muttering.

"Hopefully these two know as much as the third one. I did note their aerocar's number, but I assume it was stolen or at best rented using false credentials, so it will be worthless as a lead."

"We've got one lead right away; I can tell that these two goons are Slashers, from the chrome and glowing tats. That's kind of their gang colors, though they don't get too rigid about it. Downtown's not the same as a city on Coral that way."

Donovan nodded, though Kendric figured that the sociology of street-gang customs wasn't exactly in the Force's range of interests.

"You said they sometimes did strong-arm work," he said. "I wonder who's paying them for this job?"

"I doubt they know, unless one of these slags turns out to be their leader."

"Which would be pretty ridiculous."

"Uh-huh."

They stripped the unconscious men of their weapons and tied their wrists to their ankles behind their backs.

"Did you get anywhere on the computer?" Donovan pointed to the desk.

"Not yet. They'd set up a little decoy program to make it _look_ like they were watching me, but really just to distract me while the goon squad showed up at my door."

"The net equivalent of a rough shadow."

"Huh?"

Donovan adjusted his glasses.

"It's a surveillance term. A rough shadow is when you _want_ someone to see you following them for whatever reason: to make them think they were smart enough to see and evade you while a more skilled shadow takes over unseen, to provoke some kind of panicky action, or something else."

"Yeah, that fits. Only in this case it was 'sit here and try to figure out what's going on while thugs are moving in on you.'"

"Is there any way to trace it?"

"Doubtful. Something crude like that wouldn't leave fingerprints 'cause there was no need for complex, careful work where the net-dancer might miss a step."

"Maybe you'll have better luck with Ms. Lucerne's PDL."

"I'd almost have to. That's a real trace, which means that it's sending data from one place to another, and with luck I'll be able to follow that. You want me to get started right away, or do we tackle the goon squad first?"

"Why not multitask? There's two jobs and two of us."

"Great. We can run into dead ends twice as fast."

"You have such confidence in yourself."

"Just being realistic. Especially if your boy Stane got some hotshot Administration or Lab computer jockey to do his e-work."

"Maybe. But maybe he got the e-runner equivalent of these two," Donovan said, indicating the captured Slashers.

"Could be. But that's the difference between us, big bro. I stopped believing in Santa Claus a long time ago."

~X X X~

The milipol had come, taken the Ryland brothers' statements, and removed the two Slashers on breaking-and-entering charges by the time Lyon showed up at the res-unit.

"I wonder if Inspector Laleham will appreciate our work, now that I've provided him with the killer of Eddy and visual evidence to back it up," she said after detailing her own experiences.

"You reported all that?" Ryland was surprised.

"Of course. Any number of prying eyes might have seen me chase Eddy into the alley, and might have considered trying blackmail. Since I'm on a job, Guild extraterritoriality means that I don't have to answer questions about why I wanted to talk with him; if they care about _why_ the Slashers wanted him silenced they can investigate on their own but they have the murderer and accomplices in custody so I doubt they'll press the point." She paused. "And truthfully, if Laleham and his people start pounding away at the Slashers it can only help us. The milipol looking into their criminal activities and making arrests will keep them too busy to be running errands for our quarry."

"You're right," Ryland agreed. "Deprived of his footsoldiers, Stane, or whomever, will have to up the ante, take more drastic steps, and it is entirely possible that this will shake out someone who actually knows something."

Kendric looked back and forth between the two of them.

"'Quarry'? 'Deprived of his footsoldiers'? Do all hunters talk like that?"

"I think you may be contagious, Ryland," Lyon reflected. "It is a natural social habit for organics to unconsciously mimic the speech patterns of those they commonly associate with, and my own personality matrix is set to replicate this habit in some ways."

"You ought to hang out with me more often, then, just to balance him out."

Lyon grinned and Ryland scowled almost simultaneously.

"Banter aside, Lyon, did you manage to learn anything from your prisoners before you handed them over to the police?"

She shook her head.

"Very little. As I said in passing, they were members of the Slashers gang. The woman with the claw is named Zorah, and she's some kind of underboss, but even she didn't know who they were working for. Apparently it was set up by their leader, Vaughn Galt, and his right-hand woman, Hawk. I got the impression Zorah thought she could step in for either one of them and do a better job, but given her actual performance I can't assume I'd agree. The gang's apparently getting ten thousand meseta plus a cut of the action for this job; that much she did know."

"What action?" Ryland pounced on the key piece of information almost immediately. "Where's the future profit in any of this? Tobias Stane is a collector; he wants the Psycho-Wand for himself, not to sell it. And while he'd pay for it, that's what he's hiring hunters and street-fighters to do for him. There wouldn't be a secondary fee on top of that. Possibly a bonus for success, but not a percentage of anything."

"So what does it mean?"

Ryland rubbed his hands together, puzzling it out.

"I can think of three possibilities, if we rule out the idea that the Slashers are being lied to."

"I agree that we can dismiss that idea," Lyon said. "If they were promised a percentage they'd naturally have asked 'of what' and the answer would have to be backed up by what they'd find out in their errand-running. Plus, if he or she can't deliver, the one hiring them would know they'd come after him. There'd be nothing to gain by lying, and while the Slashers aren't exactly geniuses, they'd have to be idiots to be sold a bill of goods like that one. So your three possibilities, I guess the first is that it wasn't Stane who hired them but someone else who plans to sell the Psycho-Wand _to_ Stane or someone like him."

"Obviously." It _was_ obvious, but Lyon knew his saying so was largely from Ryland getting irked at her for not playing along. Part of what he loved about mysteries was being able to make the dramatic reveal of his deductions.

"So how about number two?"

"Number two is that rather than just do their jobs, the Slashers or their employer plan to extract more from Stane once they have the Psycho-Wand in hand. That is, the 'future action' is something they're going to create for themselves."

"That'd be stupid," Kendric said. "Guy's already commissioned multiple murders to get his hands on something and now they want to blackmail him? Why not just paint targets on their foreheads and save the time and trouble?"

Lyon couldn't argue with that.

"Still, she pointed out," greed does often make people do stupid things."

"Yeah, that's the truth. But I still don't buy it. The Slashers want to be big-time, not just a gang of punks, and you don't do that by getting a rep for screwing over your own clients."

"Unless, again, they're being hired by a third party, and _that's_ who's running the sting," Ryland pointed out. "In that case, the Slashers _are_ being loyal to the one paying them, and the double-cross is the responsibility of that person instead."

Kendric shook her head.

"Man, big bro, I do not get you sometimes. You're supposed to be this hotshot hunter, a scholar Force and all that, while I'm the underworld e-runner doing illegal biz in the shadows of the net. Yet your brain gets so twisted your ideas meet themselves coming around corners. I can't even follow half your sneaky plots."

"They're not _my_ plots," he shot back, sounding offended. "Besides, the scheming and intrigue of the streets is nothing compared to an academic research lab."

"Could we get back on track?" Lyon asked. "You said there was a third idea?"

Ryland nodded.

"Um-hm. And in its way, it's the one that makes the most sense, even though it also gives us the most trouble."

"Which probably means it's the right answer."

"True, very little can stand up to the combined power of Occam's Razor and Murphy's Law working in tandem."

"So, what is it?" Kendric wasn't much interested in probability analysis, whether mathematical, logical, or smart-alecked.

"Simple. There's something for the Slashers to get a percentage from because this business isn't _about_ retrieving a relic for a collector, and we don't have any idea what's really going on."

"Now I _know_ that's the right answer," Lyon summed up dourly.


	6. Chapter 6

"I keep coming back around to the message Dr. Lucerne passed on to his daughter," Ryland said. "That talk of a legacy hidden in the ruins. We'd thought it was the Psycho-Wand at first, but that didn't make sense so far as it went."

"Not if the ruins in the message means the wrecked spaceship the way we hunters think of it," Lyon agreed. "Kylan Lucerne wasn't a hunter, though. Would he have used it the same way?"

"I don't know, but what else could he have meant? He said to 'dig up his legacy in the past,' and Ragol doesn't _have_ a past otherwise, since we were the first attempt to establish a civilization there."

"And if we don't have some idea of where in the Ruins to look, whatever it is will remain lost. Barton Dorn might have known something, but now he's dead. Plus, we still don't know what he was doing in that bar in the first place. Although we _do_ know that it was the Slashers that killed him."

"We do? Your friend with the braids confirmed that?"

Lyon shook her head.

"No, the other woman. The prospect of choosing between murder charges over Eddy and dying of a gunshot to the abdomen. I actually had to use a Dimate on her because of the additional damage from digestive acids to save her life and she required further medical care to stabilize her." Photon healing was excellent for erasing injuries, but secondary effects such as cleaning fluid out of the lungs still required the specialized equipment of a medical center—as Justine Trent's case served as a perfect example. "Unfortunately she couldn't give specifics, but it should give Laleham something to squeeze the gang leaders with."

"Will they talk?"

Lyon shrugged.

"Maybe. If enough witnesses can tie them to the Dorn murder and they don't get any protection from someone upstairs—or get silenced." She scowled. "I could never understand how you like sorting your way through all these twists and turns."

"Finding the way from one end of a twisted maze to the other is always a pleasure for any researcher; I just apply that to my work as a hunter."

"Give me a straightforward kill-the-monsters run any day, but hey, this is your Christmas present."

Ryland shook his head.

"In this case, we really don't need to worry. If Inspector Laleham makes Galt and Hawk implicate their principal in Dorn's murder, then it benefits our client and we were responsible for it because of the Slashers we captured. If he can't or is prevented, then we're no worse off, since certainly the two of them were never going to tell _us_ anything; we had no leverage. So ultimately we have gained some knowledge that clarified our position, but it hasn't opened up any new alleys to pursue as yet."

He paused and turned to Kendric.

"The Slashers don't involve themselves in computer crime, do they? You didn't list it among their activities."

"No, they don't. They'd probably need help turning on their PDLs. Ah, I get it—there's an e-runner out there in this, and one who's not a Slasher so they'd be another lead to follow, still."

"Right."

"So now that I can work in peace, you want me to take a shot at running him down?"

"Right again. We know we'd want someone to trace the surveillance on Ms. Lucerne's PDL, and since you're the best net-dancer I know and already involved in this matter..."

Kendric nodded.

"We went over this already, bro."

"Lyon, would you stay with him? I know that we've dealt with the watchers, but at least one got away, and when whomever is behind this sees that we didn't get scared off they may try a more permanent kind of object lesson."

"Of course, but what will you be doing?"

"Talking to some of my hunter contacts. We know the Slashers were the ones who killed Dorn, but we still don't know what he was doing in Falcone's in the first place. We both didn't understand that before and it's not making any more sense now."

"So you're going to ask about Dorn?"

"Even dead, he's still a loose end."

"All right, I'll keep an eye on things here." Lyon knew that Ryland's contacts tended to be better than hers, so he was better-suited for the investigator's role. "Watch your back, okay? A whole hunter team was already taken out on this job."

He nodded. He'd have liked to tell her that this was _Pioneer 2_, not Ragol, that the Hunter's Guild wasn't like Downtown, that that scale of battle wasn't going to take place...but of course, he couldn't. They both knew better.

"You too. If someone comes down the chimney, shoot first and don't wait to see if it's Santa Claus."

Ryland left and Lyon locked the door behind him. The two thugs who'd come after Kendric had managed to get past it, so she didn't have much faith in its effectiveness, but even if all it gave was a minute's delay there was no reason to give that up.

Kendric had already seated himself at the computer desk. Lyon came to stand beside him, half turned so she could follow the door and what was going on on-screen at the same time.

"All right, let's get to work," he said, stretching his fingers. He slotted a disk into one of the computer's secondary modules and several holoscreens opened. "Can you give me that PDL number again?"

Lyon did.

"Okay, so as you know, your PDL is basically a miniature net terminal, like this machine, which is pretty much always on to receive messages and whatnot. The encryption to get _into_ a PDL is serious stuff, you can do it, but it isn't easy unless you can get the user to _let_ you in, swallow your virus, and most people aren't that stupid. That's a little something we have to thank our friendly military for; they invented the things for their use and walled them off with heavy security so some enemy hacker couldn't get in there and start ordering all the Garanzes to start shooting at their own side."

"That's sensible."

"It's why simple-mail's so hard to hack. The data's put into encrypted BEE format by your PDL, then sent to the BEE servers in that format, and then sent from BEE to the target PDL. You have to actually catch the message while it's being sent, remembering that the BEE network is its own subnet, isolated from the datanet, and even then have to decrypt it, which is almost impossible since the message is sent using the sender's unique BEE key, and then the main server decrypts it using the _recipient's_ BEE key."

"So really, if you want to read someone's simple-mail, you have to hack their PDL so you can read the decrypted message in their inbox."

"Exactly. But for a regular PDL call it's different. The message is vulnerable at many points while it's in transit, and that data can be tapped easily enough."

Lyon chuckled, and Kendric turned to look at her.

"Hey, what're you grinning at?"

"You—or rather, you and Ryland."

"Huh? I don't get you."

"That's because you haven't heard your brother going on about one of his research topics or even very much on a case. You sounded almost exactly like him, especially because you don't use so much street argot when you start in on computer topics. It requires precise language, just like when Ryland talks about Photon and magic."

Kendric looked at her, blinking in surprise as if he didn't know what to think about her conclusion.

"You think..."

She smiled even more broadly.

"You two are so much alike in some ways it's hilarious."

His eyebrows shot up.

"Maybe I should be hacking your head instead. You've got a bug in there somewhere if you think that."

"Oh? The way you get about your interests, the way you both like to dig into puzzles, your sense of responsibility...it's all there."

He looked at her harder, then sighed, shook his head, and muttered, "They made your brain _too_ human; you're getting as many weird ideas as a normal girl."

"Thank you very much," she said brightly.

"I can't win."

Lyon laughed again.

"Now, in that way, you're definitely different. Most of the time it's Ryland who gets the better of me with bad jokes."

"I envy him," Kendric muttered, and turned back to his machine. "Okay, so I'm looking for the trace program that's been put on your client's PDL. Her net connection is open, of course, constantly streaming data both ways." He pressed a few controls, and a holoscreen phased into existence to the right. "Here, you see? She's looking up an InfoNet news broadcast right now."

"You mean you're snooping her PDL right now, just like the other side is?"

"Well, yes and no. Yes, I'm snooping it, but...not quite like the other side."

"Oh?"

"This is the most usual way to tap a PDL, like I said, but...I'm not seeing any parallel traces here on her net connection." He scowled, obviously not liking coming up empty.

"Do you think, then, that they planted a virus on her, the way you said before?"

"Maybe, but..." He tapped a few more keys. "If they did it that way, then the spy program in her PDL would be transmitting its data back to the person running the trace. It might send it on its own or piggyback on Lucerne's transmissions, but either way it still has to sned that data from the PDL through the net. There's no point in snooping her if you don't find out what she's saying, but I don't find any sign of anything but her own net connection's exchange of data."

"So she's _not_ being snooped?"

"Exactly, not unless the one doing it is so much better than I am that I can't even spot it."

"Is that possible?"

He scowled.

"I wouldn't have figured it. I mean, I figure those government hotshots could cover their tracks and keep me from tracing them back, but to keep it totally stealthed?" He shook his head. "No, there's no way, not unless they had something like one of those crazy high-grade AIs. So unless you've P.O.'ed Lab Chief Milarose—"

"Not for this job; Dr. Lucerne _was_ a Lab scientist on an approved project, so there'd be no reason for them to work behind the scenes. And the Administration and the army don't have _that_ grade of AI running around."

"There I'd say we've got a problem, because there's just no trace in effect here."

"That doesn't make any sense," Lyon replied. "They _had_ to know we'd been hired or else they would never have sent the Slashers after Justine. Could they have dropped the trace after that?"

"Maybe. If they figured that they weren't likely to get anything else useful once the job started and didn't want you doing what you're trying now—getting a net-dancer to trace the connection back to its source. That sounds kind of hard to believe, though."

"But not impossible. And it would, in fact, be an accurate assessment of the risks and rewards involved." She paused. "Could you check me out in the same way?"

"Sure, that's easy. Easier, since if you'll give me access I can get into your PDL and look around." She did exactly that. A few minutes later he was shaking his head. "Nope, nothing. You're clean."

"That's good. It seemed unlikely that the leak would have been on my side, as it would have required knowledge of my presence in advance, but I thought it better safe than sorry."

"Yeah, and someone could have started snooping you afterwards, figuring at that point the hunters would be more likely to learn anything useful than the client. And on that note, it'd be good to check out big bro, too, just for completeness' sake."

That attempt, however, proved to be as fruitless as the first two.

"Sorry, that's a big o-fer there. It looks like after all that, I wasn't that useful after all."

Lyon shook her head.

"In an investigation of this sort, not every avenue will yield something useful. And, of course, there is the negative information that we've gained, that Ryland, Ms. Lucerne, and I are currently free of surveillance, whatever that means." She chuckled softly, then added, "This is why I prefer more straightforward jobs. I really don't like bland alleys and pointless searches. A simple, linear progression from start to goal is my style."

"Straightforward girl, aren't you?" he said with a grin, then lost it almost at once. "Damn it, though, I want to _do_ something. Justine got hurt because she's my girl, not from anything she did. I wanted to turn up some clue, point the finger at the guy pulling the strings." He clenched his fists. "Damn it," he repeated, "I need to fix this!"

Lyon could have reminded him of what she'd just said a few minutes ago about his similarity to Ryland in their shared sense of responsibility, but didn't think Kendric would appreciate it just then.

~X X X~

Like any other group, Ryland had found that hunters were a fairly close-knit, almost clannish bunch. This wasn't a big surprise; they were isolated from other political factions by the Guild's extraterritoriality, which ironically was the one fact that kept hunters from becoming a faction unto themselves. That might have seemed idiosyncratic—independence preventing them from becoming independent—but the point was that the present system was designed to allow _individual_ hunters to pursue their goals, not support the power of hunters as a _collective_. So long as nothing was done to attack hunter rights as a whole, they were content to let each person act on their own for whatever purpose—political, scientific, ethical, or financial—they chose.

From the outside looking in, therefore, hunters appeared to be a tight-knit group, and to a certain extent they were: shared experiences of facing Ragol's dangers, for example, lent them a bond that those who sat safely behind a desk couldn't comprehend. But from an insider's view, the Guild offered a wild diversity moreso than even the most contentious corporate or political entity simply because there was no overarching purpose to drive hunters.

"Dorn? Yeah, I know him. Jumped-up street fighter."

This explained why it was relatively easy for Ryland to gather information through what amounted to casual gossip. Talissa, a red-haired Newman wearing violet, was a veteran hunter who'd worked on a couple of jobs with Ryland when one or the other had needed to fill out a larger team. They were looking through available armor selections in the secondary Guild area near the Lab.

"A street-fighter? Really?" It was hard not to pounce eagerly on the fact, which started to make a ghost of a suggestion towards explaining what had brought Dorn to Falcone's.

Talissa nodded. Her fingers moved lithely over the panels, whisking through the catalog list deployed on the four-foot-square holoscreen in front of her.

"Uh-huh. Can you believe the inefficiency here? This Celestial Shield isn't half so useful as my Attribute Wall, but requires considerably more training and experience to handle properly."

Ryland shrugged.

"Standard military contract versus specialized prototype. One's basic technology and the other an enhanced design created here on Ragol by the _Pioneer 1_ Lab."

She raised an eyebrow.

"You _are_ interested in this Dorn, aren't you?"

He blinked, then smiled.

"That was clumsy of me, wasn't it?"

"Very much so. I haven't seen so poor a fake casual since Sejanus tried to hide my birthday present last year. What's up?"

"It's a job."

"So I gathered." She scrolled through another couple of items. "I don't even know why they sell armor without slots for augmentation units. Only low-ranking newbs who don't have access to better equipment would use it. What kind of job?"

"Dorn's dead, and the circumstances might relate to my client's interest."

"Dead, eh? And somehow, I'm guessing that doesn't mean that he was bitten in two by a dragon."

"A bar fight Downtown," Ryland said, knowing that this was more-or-less public knowledge anyway. "You can see why you mentioning he'd been a street-fighter caught my attention."

Talissa nodded.

"Oh, yes. Unfortunately, I don't know a lot more than that. I don't get along well with most of that type because nine out of ten got into the Guild because they were sponsored in by a political, corporate, or criminal patron to be their errand-runner. Like Black Paper; Mujo and his black-market ring were all hunters, and I'm sure they have others in the Guild. I don't like it when hunters are really just someone's errand boys that happen to own a Section ID badge. It's one thing to have good relationships with regular clients, but quite another to actually be one of them."

Talissa's attitude was by no means unusual among hunters.

"Do you know for a fact that Dorn was one of them?"

She shook her head.

"No, I didn't associate with him enough to have specific details. I do know that he was sponsored into the Guild by some Lab researcher, who paid his entrance fee and initial outfitting costs. Which might be exactly what it looks like; a lot of Lab projects require the help of hunters and he might have just wanted someone whose primary loyalty was established instead of trying out someone new who might be bribable by jealous rivals. Or he might have been fronting for one faction or another."

Ryland nodded.

"It's worth looking into. I don't suppose you know whom it was that sponsored him?"

Talissa shook her head.

"Sorry; I only know the general details." She snapped her fingers suddenly as a thought hit her. "I do know who you might ask, though. Dorn had a couple of pretty good friends, and they'd probably know what he was up to. Of course, they might not appreciate you prying into his business—"

"—but they might make an exception if it meant solving his murder."

"Exactly. It's worth taking a shot, anyway."

"So who are they?"

"Their names are Wayland Parr and...oh, what was the android's name again? She was a Hunter model, not a Weinstine but the next rank down, an Arkheiz Co. Rapier-Type..." Talissa drummed her fingers on the edge of the console. "Ah! Coris, her name was."

"Were they also former Downtown types?"

"Parr I don't know about. Coris, obviously not, though if Dorn was on someone's string she might have the same allegiance. Or not; they might just be friends. Have been friends," she amended.

"I'll talk to them, then. Thanks, Talissa; I appreciate the information."

"Not a problem. Dorn might or might not have been somebody's lackey, but he was still a hunter. Dangerous jobs are part of the business, but murder is something else entirely." She sighed, then said, "Now, if someone had bumped off this armor shop owner, I might have a different position. The selection here is awful!"


	7. Chapter 7

"A lab researcher?" Lyon asked as the disorientation of long-range teleportation passed, leaving the two hunters in a sunny clearing. She noted the difference in the air quality, the warmth of the sun on her body, and the difference between the artificial lighting on board _Pioneer 2_ and the natural light of Ragol's surface, though she doubted her emotional reaction to those things were similar to her companion's. To Ryland, being planetside likely conjured up memories of "home," lent him a sense of peace and stability to have real ground under his feet.

For Lyon, those things merely reminded her that she was in the field, to direct processing power to monitoring her environment and being prepared for combat with monsters at any time. It was hard to appreciate the orange-red of the sunset or the splash of water falling over rocks when alert for ambushes that might come from any direction.

"That's what Talissa said," Ryland confirmed.

Lyon readied her gungnir, a partisan-type weapon with a golden Photon blade. Ordinarily as a Ranger her role would be to support with long-range gunfire, but she preferred close-range combat when possible as a matter of personal style. Moreover, since Ryland himself was a long-range fighter, it was good team strategy for her to indulge those desires, engaging the enemy in hand-to-hand range to keep him clear. Some FOmars liked to get up close and personal with their enemies, but Ryland was the opposite. He didn't even carry a weapon, so that he could invoke techniques all the faster. They were good partners in battle as well as out.

"She's usually reliable," Lyon noted. "She usually doesn't like to pass on rumors unless they have some solid backing."

"True. And doesn't it raise some interesting questions about what's happening?"

"It sounds more like it gives us _answers_. Dr. Lucerne was a Lab researcher, Dorn's sponsor was a Lab researcher; we've seen those rivalries get ugly before." The latest discoveries from Ragol could mean power, status, position, all the things that motivated the ambitious. "Or one or the other of them might have been a plant from a different faction, like the military or Black Paper."

"Those are good points."

"Plus, Dorn's past as a street-fighter ties in. It's another link between his employer and the underworld—first Dorn, and now the Slashers. And it explains why he'd be dumb enough to walk into Falcone's; he was from that milieu and more comfortable in it than you or I would be. Although it makes him seem even dumber, in a way, since he _really_ should have known better given his past."

"I can't stop asking myself about that," Ryland agreed. "Dorn's behavior is distinctly out of character for what we know of him. Either there's more to the man than we're aware...or there's more to the case. And that's why I say we have questions."

"Let's just hope we can find some answers. I'd hate to come down here to Ragol for nothing. And Parr and Coris probably aren't going to be too happy to see us, so it may not just be the monsters we need to worry about."

Their trip to Ragol had a simple purpose. Ryland had figured the next step on Dorn would be to follow up with his associates, only to learn that they had taken on a Guild Quest, clearing a section of the forested area near the Central Dome for a Lab project.

"At least it isn't likely they're tied up in the conspiracy with Dorn, not if they're off taking jobs while things are going down on board the ship."

"Unless the job is a put-up by which their employer is going to have them killed." She remembered one of their own cases earlier in the year where they'd discovered that someone had done that to arrange for a hunter's death.

"I don't think so. First, the quest was a general Lab posting, with Chief Milarose's assistant Dan as the contact."

"Don't forget what Kendric said. Use of an AI like Calus is the only way there could be electronic traces in place that he couldn't find, and that would require Chief Milarose's involvement."

Ryland shook his head.

"The only way that works is if it's _Dr. Lucerne_ who was the one who was a plant for a non-Lab faction. Otherwise she can do whatever she wants with the data naturally, because he worked for her. And if it's true, it makes virtually everything Revelle Lucerne told us wrong."

"She's apparently been wrong about a fair number of things so far."

"True, but I find it hard to believe she was _that_ far off-base about her own father."

Lyon shrugged.

"I don't have family, so I don't have any personal experience to extrapolate from, but I do know that relationships can vary widely."

"Point taken," he grumbled, realizing that she was at least partly referring to he himself and Kendric.

"Still and all...this doesn't feel like something Chief Milarose is involved with."

"Lyon, did you just say, 'feel like'?"

"Yes."

"How does an android without a subconscious have an intuition?"

She snorted, or rather mimicked the sound of one.

"It's an idiomatic substitution for 'has a low probability of association based upon a comparison of known data about this job with other matters Chief Milarose was known to take part in directing.' My personality matrix _is_ programmed to find appropriate linguistic choices to streamline conversation when absolute precision isn't necessary. Unless you prefer me to use twenty-eight words when eight would do?" she added, grinning. Ryland grinned back.

"Now, we can't have you stealing my role in this partnership, can we?"

"No, indeed. Come on, let's see if we can find those people."

They moved out into the forest. From experience, they knew this section was roughly laid out as a large loop. Their arrival block was a small dead-end offshoot, but led into the loop proper. Signs of battle were evident, indicating that the other group had already come this way.

"We'll try to meet them coming the opposite direction," Ryland decided, "or we might end up chasing them in a circle and having them leave the area before we catch up."

"All right. West first, and if that's been cleared already, south instead?"

"Sounds fine. Is there a reason you'd rather go west first?"

"It's prettier."

"That's as good a reason as any."

Unfortunately, Lyon did not get her wish. The security gate at the far end of the western block showed green, indicating that the sensors did not detect any hostile presences. In other words, the block had been cleared recently. They went back the other way and headed across a stream south to a roughly round area. Sure enough, the energy field blocking its south exit was active, and the security gate to the west red-lit.

They didn't have long to wait. Wolflike creatures hurtled at them from the underbrush and began a circling stalk. Unlike the savage wolves seen in other areas, these were entirely reptilian in appearance, covered in gray plate-like armor with two huge, curving horns protruding from their shoulders...which were roughly level with Lyon's own despite the Gulguses being four-footed animals.

"Still convinced this mission wasn't a deathtrap?" she remarked dryly.

"I think we should worry about us," Ryland pointed out. With a quick gesture, a red haze settled across the animals, followed rapidly by a blue one. The Jellen and Zalure techniques set up a Photon field that reduced the force of the enemy's attacks and the resistance of their armor, which combined with the Shifta and Deband Ryland had already set up on the hunters made things much more manageable.

It was a good thing, too, because in the next instant the Gulguses sprang. One nearly hit Ryland from behind; Lyon lunged to intercept, thrust her gungnir up under its shoulders and levered it off to the side so it crashed to the ground instead of hitting Ryland's back. In the next instant, though, another one of the creatures hit _her_ from behind, knocking her sprawling. It leaped again, but Ryland nailed it in the side with a jet of fire using the Foie technique and staggered it, breaking its attack.

Given the circling attack patterns of the Gulguses, Lyon's gungnir wasn't the ideal weapon; she abandoned it as she rolled over and drew her Durandal. The saber was a close-range weapon, but its Photon blade was much more powerful than the partisan's. She thrust swiftly from a sitting position, piercing the burned Gulgus before it could gather itself for another attack.

That was one down and three to go. While Lyon was getting to her feet, Ryland used Gifoie, sending several balls of fire spiraling out from him, then followed up with Razonde to saturate the area with lightning. The second technique caused one of the Gulguses to seize up, shocked into paralysis, and Lyon was quick to finish it off.

With the enemies reduced to two, the fight was over quickly. The Gulguses disliked frontal attacks by their nature and strove to attack their prey's weak points, but in taking one on each, Lyon and Ryland were able to keep themselves covered and get in several quick strikes. When the last Gulgus fell, the security gate switched from red to green.

"This area must have been cleared not long before now," Ryland decided. "Usually any human activity would attract several groups of animals; it's surprising that things would be free enough of hostiles that the gate would trigger after only one pack."

"I'll buy that. I'm just happy, regardless of the reason. After all, we're not being paid to fight hostiles on Ragol."

"You have a point."

They headed west, knowing that the south exit was a dead end and that Parr and Coris couldn't be there since it had been sealed before their arrival. They followed a narrow path that curved to the south, then came back up in a V towards the north before reaching another gate.

Shouts and cries of alarm had them rushing forward. Inside the clearing, they found a battle going on. The massive form of a thing that looked like a cross between an ape and a bear, with huge curving horns and thick, bristling brown fur towered over a red-carapaced android. She was designed to look something like a martial-arts assassin, with the part of her face where her mouth should be instead blank so that it looked like she was wearing a half-mask, and her head with a topknot-style "tail" even longer than Lyon's. She was wielding a pair of Photon daggers with blades like rainbow feathers. As the hunters entered the clearing, she glanced in their direction at the sound of the gate opening and it cost her; the monster swung its huge fist in a massive roundhouse that connected like a hammer and launched her through the air to crash down a good ten feet away.

"I'll help her; give us some cover," Ryland said.

"On it." Lyon charged, wondering what on earth a Hildelt was doing this far from the Central Dome.

The android's partner was doing his bit. A thin man in white with spiky brown hair, he pumped rapid fire from a pair of H&S25 Justice mechguns into the Hildelt's body.

"Parr!" Lyon called to him, guessing his identity. "Shoot the trap!"

The instant she was in range she launched a freeze trap, then slashed at the Hildelt's legs with her Durandal. Parr was probably still trying to figure out what was happening, but the human Ranger was experienced enough to get the point. He fired at the hovering trap, his shot cracking the casing and detonating it immediately rather than having to wait for its timer to run down. The freezing effect swept over the Hildelt, holding it in place so Lyon could dart around to its back, away from the sweeping punch it had started to throw. She slashed furiously at the monster once, twice, three times while Parr resumed firing on it, but the trap's effect wore off quickly, and the Hildelt spun towards her.

Before the enraged creature could strike, though, it began to glow as brilliant streams of light seemed to coalesce out of the air and flow to it. In the next instant the light gathered and burst, Ryland's Grants technique blasting the Hildelt with devastating effect. It staggered back, roaring in pain—and Coris, fully rejuvenated by Ryland's healing technique, sprang up into the air and drove the shimmering blades of her Blade Dance into its back. She ripped them free, kicking off, and the monster toppled forward, landing face-first with a thunderous crash. Lyon had barely stepped aside in time to keep it from landing on her.

"That was too close," Parr gasped, relief obvious in his narrow, sharp-featured face.

"Yes; when I was forced to expand my last freeze trap against the Tollaws, it left us in a bad position," Coris replied matter-of-factly. "Your assistance is appreciated, strangers," she addressed Lyon and Ryland.

"Not that much of strangers; the android knew my name."

"That's because we're here looking for you." Ryland adjusted his spectacles. "The Guild let us know you were on this quest, so we came down."

"It must be awfully urgent business you've got, to come to Ragol and poke in on someone else's job," Parr replied, his suspicion evident. "Especially since we don't know the two of you from a Rappy."

Ryland nodded.

"I'm Donovan Ryland, and this is Lyon."

"Wayland Parr, but you know that already."

"Arkheiz Co. Type Rapier-C94, individual designation Coris," the Hucaseal said formally. "We are grateful for your assistance," she repeated.

"You're welcome," Lyon said.

"Now, what can we do for you?"

Lyon turned to Ryland.

"We're working on a job that ran up against Barton Dorn's death. I was told that the two of you were his friends, so we'd like to learn what we can."

Butterflies flitted by peacefully, their wings picking up the flame-tinted evening sunlight to gleam iridescently.

"Dorn, huh." Parr let out a deep sigh. "You were told right; we were friends. Which brings up the question of why we should be talking about him to you?"

"You're a suspicious one," Lyon remarked. "Was Dorn into something underhanded that you'd want to keep out of general knowledge?"

Parr glanced at her.

"Watch your mouth," he snapped. "Just 'cause Bart used to be a street fighter didn't mean he was some thug. Sure, he ran errands and stuff for his sponsor, but it wasn't some illegal crap, just a guy bettering himself by using his skills. Or have you got something against a fellow trying to make a decent living?"

"Dorn is dead," Ryland said quietly. "What he was or wasn't isn't important, except as it relates to what he was involved with. And along the way, there's also the fact that we hope to turn up who killed him in that staged bar fight."

"Staged?" both of Dorn's friends asked together.

Lyon nodded.

"That's how it appears, that the chaos was created by the Slashers gang so that someone could kill Dorn."

"The Slashers? That doesn't even make sense. Dorn _was_ a Slasher, back in his street-fighting days."

Lyon and Ryland shared a look.

"That would explain a lot," he told her. "We were wondering why Dorn would visit Falcone's in the middle of whatever he's doing, but as an ex-Slasher, he'd probably expect them to be on his side."

"Watching his back, not putting a knife in it," Lyon agreed. She turned to Parr and added, "Presuming that he left them on good terms?"

"I never heard anything different."

"If the Slashers are small-timers, that's about what we'd expect," Lyon said, wishing that Kendric was there to give them specifics from his Downtown knowledge. "A more ambitious group might get into that 'once in, never out' area."

"I think it's more accurate to say that he never truly separated from them," Coris offered her opinion, causing three heads to turn in her direction. "He did maintain personal ties, after all, went out drinking with his old crew and so on. He would not have been involved with their day-to-day criminal activities, of course."

"So why would the Slashers take out one of their own?" Lyon protested.

"Because he was holding out, playing both ends against the middle," Ryland concluded.

Parr's lip curled in a sneer. "So much for not trying to smear Bart."

"I can't change the facts," Ryland said. "And the facts are, if Dorn was still in good standing with the gang, they wouldn't have killed him. It doesn't make sense for them to just up and kill him if he was doing what they wanted, not even if the one hiring them wanted him silenced because he knew too much or the like. A gang isn't like a corporation or government group where subordinates are valued only to the extent they can provide a benefit and to the extent of the leader's conscience."

Lyon thought that one over. It probably had some flaws, but as a general rule it seemed to make sense.

"I'm not buying it," Parr snapped. "You stand back-to-back with a guy in the field, you know what he's like. He wouldn't turn on his friends."

"It probably wasn't them he turned on, but his sponsor," Ryland pointed out. "Everything looks that way, that he was sent to recover data and that he didn't deliver it, either to the rightful owners or to the one who ordered the datasnatch in the first place. Maybe he had his reasons; he might have been conflicted over his loyalty to his sponsor versus his life as a hunter. As you say, you've stood with him in the field and would know best if he was trying to move on. Or maybe he figured that he was getting hung out to dry, taking too much of the risk for not enough of the reward and wanted to renegotiate the terms."

Lyon noted that her partner hadn't even hinted at Dorn's possible involvement in the deaths of Dr. Lucerne and the other hunters on the expedition. Of course, there was no proof that he _had_ been involved or indeed that there was any foul play at all. But given Parr's defensiveness, it wasn't hard to imagine that even implying it would shut off any information there.

Then again, maybe there was a good reason for Parr's attitude. The three hunters had been friends and co-workers. And it was true; when you fought side-by-side with someone, putting your life in their hands, you very soon learned what kind of person they were, not just their overall trustworthiness but what _kind_ of weaknesses they had. Lyon was sure, for example, that if Ryland ever did betray her trust it would not be for a large cash payment but something more meaningful to him.

Maybe some of their deductions about Barton Dorn weren't taking the man's character into account, and so were flawed because of it.

Parr, at least, seemed to take the last choice. He turned and spat into the grass.

"I don't buy it. Dorn absolutely wasn't the kind to stab someone in the back or go back on a deal. If he was playing a game, it's because somebody else played _him_ first. Girls and booze were his only bad habits, and neither one to excess."

"With a variable definition of 'to excess,'" Coris chimed in. "On our second job, he asked if I was ESI-capable, and on the third if I wanted him to pay for the upgrade."

Lyon laughed; the humans did not, no doubt uncomfortable with the implications as to gender and race.

"Since he lived, I'm guessing that he was kidding?"

"Mostly," Coris replied with a tilt of her head that suggested a smile; with pupilless eyes and no mouth it was hard for her to express herself through facial expressions. Lyon wondered if that ever bothered her or if she ever considered a carapace alteration to change it.

"We're getting a little off-track here," Ryland cut in, probably as much out of a desire to get away from the uncomfortable topic of android sexuality as from the need to do the job.

"You were never _on_ track, so long as you keep calling Bart Dorn a double-dealer," Parr snapped.

"All right, then, let's say he was loyal, to his friends, his ex-associates, his Guild clients, and his backer. That's still a lot of different loyalties to conflict over."

"You keep talking about Dorn's 'sponsor' or 'backer' as if it was some kind of secretive association," Coris pointed out.

"Isn't it? Most of the time when a group arranges for one of its operatives to get a Hunter's Guild membership, they don't like to advertise that their man _is_ their man."

"And we keep telling you that Dorn wasn't like those guys," Coris shot back. "There wasn't any secret about it. Hell, Dorn was _grateful_ to him, told us that he was a good guy for seeing his potential and giving him a shot at the higher pay and the respect that came with being a hunter. It was only natural, he figured, to put the man's jobs first, even if they might not be as well-paying as others he might have available. We even worked one with him a few months back. It wasn't anything unusual, just a basic data retrieval job."

Lyon and Ryland shared another glance. If what Parr and Coris were saying was true, then their assumptions were falling one after another like dominoes. Like Ryland had said, when Black Paper planted one of its people as a hunter, they didn't go around advertising the fact, and the same went for other factions. Why have secret agents who weren't secret?

"If it's not a secret, then you wouldn't mind telling us who his sponsor was?" Lyon asked.

"Of course we wouldn't," Parr said, "particularly if it helps you to get it through your heads that you won't find Bart's killer by kicking dirt on his memory."

"There's no need to be insulting," Ryland countered. "We only have what's come up in the investigation so far. For all we know, he could have been a saint or been Dark Falz's second cousin, and I'm tired of you claiming we have an agenda for picking the latter."

"Ryland..." Lyon said, touching his arm lightly. It was strange to see him lose his temper; it wasn't at all like him.

Then again, it wasn't every job where the opposition used his family as a weapon against him.

She glanced at Coris, and her fellow android nodded. There was no point in letting their organic partners' personal concerns make something get foolishly out of hand.

"Dorn's sponsor was a scientist with the Lab named Dr. Kylan Lucerne."

Lyon could almost hear the clattering sound in her mind as the rest of the dominoes toppled.


	8. Chapter 8

"That can't possibly be true," Ryland insisted for at least the sixth time since they'd returned to _Pioneer 2_.

"Why not?" his brother said, leaning back in the padded chair. Lyon's residential unit was Spartan in the extreme, consisting of the standard couch, table, chairs, and information/entertainment center that came with the furnished accommodations, her recharge unit, and a small cabinet with personal mementos. The fact that the kitchen had food at all was purely a courtesy to her occasional organic guests.

"It turns everything on its head. We've been assuming that Dorn was a plant for the opposition on Dr. Lucerne's team, possibly even involved in the attack that killed them."

"We were?" Lyon asked. "Mostly, I've been completely confused by who's doing what to whom."

"Of course. Why else would he have been hanging around in a bar, dealing with shady gang types and giving obscure clues to our client?"

"Doesn't it make more sense that he retreated to Downtown because an obscure clue is what Dr. Lucerne gave _him_?" Kendric suggested.

"Yes, but we didn't know then that Dorn _was_ an ex-Slasher, so his behavior was more suspicious."

"So actually _both_ pieces of new information are consistent with each other, but against your original assumption."

Ryland folded his hands, leaning forward.

"That's a legitimate point, of course."

"Yes, big bro, it is."

"But it still leaves us with several different questions. First: taking out a hunter team in an ambush requires skill, power, and professionalism. That means hunters or possibly military; there's no other choices."

"I'll buy that," Kendric agreed. "You two would know more about that, both being hunters and having Ragol experience."

"He's right," Lyon said, "and there's supporting evidence. Dorn was one of Dr. Lucerne's team. We don't know anything about that team, but we do know that Dorn often worked with Wayland Parr and Coris, and we just fought alongside them. They're both on our level as hunters, and that suggests Dorn was as well, or else he'd have been more of an annoyance than a help to them. If Dr. Lucerne's escort was made up of people with that grade of ability and equipment, then Ryland's deduction is absolutely correct."

"Thank you," Ryland said. "Now, consider that since we've been pursuing this job, our opposition has been anything but expert and professional."

"Eh?"

"Justine ambushed and attacked by street thugs. More Slashers looking for you and covering Eddy. Lyon and I are known to be involved—else why warn Justine—but we found no physical surveillance and you found no electronic surveillance. We're allowed to run loose. None of this makes any sense. That's one of the reasons I was so sure Dorn was a plant."

"I'm not following," Kendric admitted.

"If he was a plant, working for an outsider, then he might have arranged the deaths of his team and Dr. Lucerne, then lied to Ms. Lucerne about what had happened," explained Lyon, who did follow. "What Ryland was saying about professionalism and skill only applies if there really was an attack by an outside group."

"Oh, I see. But you don't buy it now?"

"It would mean that Dorn had two separate secret loyalties in addition to being a hunter. I'll buy guys being two-faced, as having both organizational loyalties and personal loyalties, but not that he's in the secret pay of two separate groups, especially when he owes one of them big-time."

"What about the Slashers, then? They're associated with the other side, right? And Dorn would have some loyalty to them as an ex-member..." Kendric started, then trailed off as he realized the obvious problem. "But then why would they kill him?"

"If he was holding them up for blackmail—not turning over the 'legacy' unless they gave him more money, I mean? That would explain his behavior, but that went right out as soon as we learned the Slashers gang was on the other side."

"Maybe he didn't know?" Lyon suggested. "If he was dealing with the boss, he might not be aware that the Slashers had been brought in as footsoldiers?"

"But would the Slashers kill him, then? Loyalty runs both ways."

They both looked at Kendric, and he just shrugged.

"Hell if I know. Depends on the kind of people they are. Some gangs are all blood-brother types and some are like a pack of starving alley cats."

"It still runs smack into the original problem, though. Can we believe Barton Dorn was a double agent for someone else against Dr. Lucerne?" Ryland summed it up. "If Parr and Coris were right about the kind of man he was, the answer is no. And that leaves us, if not right back at the beginning, then at least without any real answers."

"So where do we look next?"

Kendric got up from his chair and walked into the kitchen, filling a glass with cold water and taking a swig.

"The Slashers—or at least their leader—know who hired them."

"But as we discussed before, Vaughn Galt and Hawk aren't likely to talk," Ryland countered. "They'd have to either be offered something to sell out the one that's paying them, or else we'd have to coerce it out of them. Neither one's very viable. If we tried busting in and taking them by force, even if we had enough firepower to handle the job—which is possible—they could actually yell for the milipol and _we'd_ be the ones going to jail. If we could positively link them to Dorn's murder, then Laleham might use the promise of official leniency to get information from them, but as I said, we've been over that already."

"Plus, Laleham may not be inclined to share even if he does learn something," Lyon noted. "His allegiance is to the law and to the military chain of command, not us. He shares information because he knows it helps to bring criminals to justice, not just to be nice."

"What else have we got?" Kendric set his empty glass down on the counter. "We can't follow up on the electronic surveillance because there wasn't any. You tried looking for Dorn's backer and it brought you around in a circle. What's left?"

"Not much," Lyon agreed with him.

"There's one point of attack left," Ryland contradicted them both, "and it's one that connects most of our unanswered questions: what is it that everyone's after, where is it now, if Dorn's riddle had any meaning, the nature of the opposition and what side or sides Dorn was on, everything. We've spent this whole job playing around at the edges, while we should have been looking directly at the life—and death—of the man in the middle of it: Dr. Kylan Lucerne."

~X X X~

Ryland sipped at the concoction that passed for coffee in the Blue Grotto. What he couldn't understand was, _all_ coffee on _Pioneer 2_ was artificial nutrition substitute, made in bulk with little possible variance in product quality between different restaurants or take-home supplies to be made in one's kitchen. So how did this place manage to be so consistently awful at it?

A fish gave him a curious look, perhaps sympathizing with him or just having its attention caught by the face he was making.

His PDL beeped once, revealing a simple-mail message from Kendric. About thirty seconds later, Revelle Lucerne approached the table and sat down. The silver-haired Newman was wearing a long-sleeved, flowing white shirt with red piping and a green, knee-length sheath skirt that looked fetching on her despite its somewhat kitschy Christmas colors.

"I hope this is all right," she said. "I...was hoping that we wouldn't have to meet again until everything was resolved."

"I understand your concerns. Actually, that's why we wanted a face-to-face meeting; there's too many ways to snoop on electronic communications—even though so far our adversary doesn't seem to be interested in trying that angle—and simple-mail is a limited method, the details too complex to discuss in short message bursts. Did you want something to drink or eat?"

Lucerne shook her head.

"No, thank you."

"You probably have better sense than I do," Ryland noted, pushing his cup aside. "The coffee here makes me envy androids."

"Well, that's not hard; there's lots of things about us to envy," Lyon chimed in as she approached.

"She's clear?" Ryland asked.

Lyon nodded.

"Uh-huh. As best as I can tell, she's not being shadowed."

"We're also watching through the Grotto's security cameras," Ryland told their client.

"Oh! You didn't have to—"

"We were aware of the possible risks, too. While it's never possible to be absolutely sure of everything, we can at least take precautions."

"Thank you. I appreciate it."

Lyon joined them at the table.

"Have you told her why you asked for this meeting?"

"Not yet. We'd just gotten past the introductions." He picked up his cup, then frowned at it and set it aside again, mostly out of self-preservation. "Ms. Lucerne, we need to know more about your father's last expedition to Ragol."

"More?"

She tipped her head to one side curiously, in an almost exact mirror of the gesture that Lyon used. _Well, you can't say that Lyon's body language isn't lifelike,_ Ryland thought.

"Mm-hm. Specifically, can you tell us about the hunters who acted as his escort?"

"I'll try. I don't really know a lot about it. I mean, Father didn't tell me much about it."

"I understand. At the very least, though, he would have gotten a simple-mail message from the Guild confirming that his quest had been accepted and which hunters had taken the job. As his heir, you'd have access to his communications accounts."

She nodded.

"Yes, that's right. Obviously I don't have any ability to see his Lab data, but I do for his regular accounts." She took out her PDL, which was a common hand-held civilian model instead of the enhanced-function navigational unit hunters wore on their forearms. "Is it safe to do it remotely?"

"I think so. We investigated and found that you weren't under electronic surveillance." Realizing that Kendric had never investigated the dead scientist's accounts, though, he sent a simple-mail message for his brother to keep an overwatch eye from the Net, just in case this proved to be the exception to the other side's tactics. "You can go ahead."

"All right." She quickly used the hand unit to link to Dr. Lucerne's account and pulled up the simple-mail log. "I don't see...oh, here it is, in the trash directory. Luckily it didn't autodelete; I'll move it back to the inbox in case you need it later as evidence or something."

"Good thinking. Who are the hunters?"

"It doesn't give any details, but there are names. The message says, 'Your Guild Quest posting has been accepted by the following hunters who meet your requirements: Robin Vance, Barton Dorn, Sif-04A, and Cyndra Vallere. Please meet them at the Guild offices at 450 beats.' That's it." She looked at them curiously. "Why do you want to know about them?"

Ryland pressed his fingertips together.

"It's Barton Dorn. We've been trying to find out what he was doing, the circumstances of his death. The logical assumption was that he was involved in what happened to your father."

Lucerne gasped.

"I don't believe that! Dorn was a friend of Father's, who'd worked with him many times before! And I told you that Father was killed in an ambush."

Ryland shook his head.

"No, you told us that _Dorn told you_ that Dr. Lucerne was killed in an ambush. That isn't the same thing."

She stared at him for a second, then shook her head forcefully.

"No, I don't believe it. I can't imagine that one of Father's trusted allies would do such a thing. Dorn owed Father for giving him a chance when other people wouldn't."

"And that's the inconsistency. We learned the same kind of things about Dorn. He was once a member of a Downtown street gang called the Slashers, until Dr. Lucerne helped him become a Guild member."

"The Slashers appear to be the ones who killed him," Lyon added, "and they've been working for the other side on this job, including killing a man who could have been a witness and assaulting a woman. You can see what doesn't fit, there?"

"I...do you mean, he should have been on good terms with the Slashers, and so they shouldn't have killed him? Or if not, then he would have known they were dangerous and stayed away from their territory?"

Ryland nodded.

"That's it exactly. That's why we think something's wrong with the whole scenario. If Dorn was really on your side and your father's, why give you cryptic hints and hang around Downtown? If he wasn't, then why was he killed? It doesn't add up, so we're going back to the beginning to see where we missed a step."

"It all sounds so confusing!"

"That's been the problem," Lyon said wryly.

"These other hunters," Ryland asked. "Do you know any of them?"

Lucerne looked down at her PDL screen again, checking the simple-mail. "No," she said, shaking her head. "I'm afraid not. But that doesn't mean that Father didn't know them or work with them before; he didn't tell me everything, especially since I wasn't actually involved in his work."

"I understand. We'll have to follow it up ourselves."

"Good luck."

"We'll be in touch if we learn anything else."

The hunters rose to leave, but Lucerne leaned across the table and stopped Ryland with a gentle touch on his arm.

"Yes?"

"Mr. Ryland, have you been able to solve what Father meant by digging up his legacy in the past?"

"Not yet, I'm afraid."

"Don't you think that's the most important thing, though? If Stane, or someone else, gets to it first, then Father's work might be lost forever even if you're able to untangle what Dorn was doing and why?"

"No, before that."

Lucerne blinked at him, shrinking a little from the Force's sudden vehemence.

"I...I said something about Father's legacy being lost forever if you didn't get to it before Stane did."

Ryland shook his head, his ponytail almost coming around over his shoulder. "No, that's not quite right. Lyon?"

"She said, 'If Stane, or someone else, gets to it first, then Father's work might be'—"

"Yes, that was it!" Ryland cut her off. "Not 'Father's legacy,' but 'Father's _work_'! That's the difference! That's what we've been looking for."

"I don't understand," Lucerne said helplessly.

"I think I do," Lyon said. "Ryland, you figure that what we're chasing isn't an object at all, not the Psycho-Wand or any other kind of collectible. Unearthing treasures like that would count as 'work'—that's what you meant, right, Mr. Lucerne?"

"Mm-hm."

"But you think it's something different, right, Ryland?"

"Exactly. I think it's data we're after. Dr. Lucerne may have made a breakthrough, or turned up one that _Pioneer 1_ made, concerning weapons technology or some other aspect of Photon manipulation. If it's significant enough, it would be worth a _lot_ of money to the right parties."

"And that's what Zorah meant about the Slashers expecting a piece of the action. They mean the sale of that data."

"You have to stop them!" Lucerne exclaimed. "They murdered my father to get their hands on that data. Even if we can't prove Stane was behind it, we absolutely can't let him have what he wants!"

Ryland smiled.

"Don't worry. We don't intend to. Some of us have our own scores to settle with these people. Now, you said before that your father's expedition was to a subterranean area under Gal De Val Island, near the Control Towers?"

"Yes, it was."

"Do you have a more specific location?"

"Yes, I do, but why?"

"I think, if we're going to find out where your father sent his legacy, we need to go down and take a look."

~X X X~

Lyon kept watch to make sure no one picked up their client's trail as she left the Blue Grotto; after that Lucerne would be on her own. She then returned to the table, watching the holographic fish beneath her feet and comparing them to the behavior of the real ones in the walls. The false fish followed predictable patterns, but also ones that insured there was always something to look at, while the living creatures went their own way rather than being concerned with putting on a show.

"You're serious about going down to Gal De Val?" Lyon asked as she sat down.

"Most definitely. I think that we're on the right track. Finally," he added, the somewhat sour note more like something Lyon would say than Ryland's usual self.

"All right, then, explain it to me. If I'm going to be playing tag with firebreathing monkeys, I'd at least like to know why."

Ryland raised his eyebrows in surprise.

"You don't see?"

"No, I don't, and you're very polite to not be smirking about it even though I know you're elated to get the chance to play the Great Detective and impress me."

He gave her a wan little smile.

"I'm grateful for the compliment, but it's unearned. I'm not holding back out of self-control, but because of Kendric and Justine. He checked with the Medical Center before this meeting, and there's been no change in her condition, so that has me a little more worried. So now that the first flush of discovery is over..." He shrugged.

"I think I understand," Lyon told him. Intellectually, she did, though of course she had no proper family of her own. But then again, Ryland himself was the closest thing to family that she had, and her concern for him was probably not too different from his concerns for Kendric. After all, she'd been the one to get them involved in the business to begin with, her gift that had ended up causing him these worries, though of course in an unforeseen way.

It was actually interesting, how her personality matrix was pressing her into acting on a sense of responsibility for this matter. She didn't feel _guilty_, per se—that would have been irrational and she was only designed to have that emotion when _predictable_ negative consequences resulted from her actions, unlike an organic whose subconscious would conflate the two emotions—but the responsibility to and concern for her partner were still there.

"Well, you know half of it already, the part about what Dr. Lucerne's 'legacy' actually is," Ryland moved on, tacitly accepting her sympathy.

"Right. That part I agree with. It answers several of the questions and inconsistencies that we had with the idea of a physical object being what everyone's after. On the other hand, it doesn't follow that a collector like Stane would want research data unless it was on behalf of the Administration, not his own interests."

"We really don't have any indication that Stane is involved at all," Ryland pointed out. "That was just Revelle Lucerne's suspicion, based on his rivalry with her father. I think we can eliminate him as a red herring at this point, unless something new turns up. The money's coming from one or more of the usual suspects in this kind of business, I'm sure. The only real question is whether the Slashers and other lackeys, possibly including Dorn, work for them directly, or if the prime mover in all this is a middleman, looking to acquire the data and then sell it to Weinstine or Black Paper or someone like that. If I had to guess, I'd say it's the latter."

"Because of the percentage the Slashers are supposed to get?"

"Right. If their client was the end user of the data, they'd pay a flat fee instead."

Lyon nodded.

"I follow you so far. What I don't understand is why we need to go down to Ragol again. What do you expect to find by retracing Dr. Lucerne's footsteps?"

"Where he sent the data."

"I definitely don't follow."

"Dr. Lucerne was a Lab scientist. Therefore, whatever work he did in the past would have been on Lab projects and duly submitted to them. It doesn't make sense that he'd withhold data from them and leave it for his daughter as an inheritance in the future. He'd have either sold the data himself or just left her the money, or what's much more likely, have just done his job the way he was supposed to and submitted his results properly. _That_ information, his past projects, is therefore in the hands of the Lab and if someone wants it they'd be going against the Lab and not playing games hunting some hidden legacy."

"Okay, that does make sense."

"Similarly, the fact that people are chasing this data implies that it wasn't something Dr. Lucerne worked on in the comfort of his own laboratory, using the Lab computers. So very likely this is work done on the surface of Ragol. The most likely idea is some research data or project done by the _Pioneer 1_ Lab, the exact kind of thing he went looking for. Retrieving _Pioneer 1_ data is a hit-or-miss game, since their Lab AI core, Olga, was used in those crazy D-Factor experiments and corrupted by Dark Falz."

"Right, since anything left has to be scavenged from independent units or backup disk copies and the network failure makes it impossible to do remote searches reliably."

A school of brilliantly colored tropical fish swam by in a wedge-shaped formation, their movements slow and stately.

"So, because of that, if he was down on Ragol recovering data—or working with it—that data would have been there. Then, when whatever happened took place, Dr. Lucerne reacted to the emergency by sending the data somewhere, some cache that he'd prepared in advance or just know about, maybe a computer placed by a previous research team in the ruins, which would explain his clue. I doubt it's possible to retrieve the information without going to where it is now—Kendric would know that better than I do—but we ought to be able to find out where to look."

Lyon smiled at her partner.

"You ought to be smirking over that one. All right, I'm on board. We'll go down and take a look, and maybe answer the riddle without having to actually solve it. Only, I can think of two problems."

"What are those?"

"First, I think we need backup that we can trust. Gal De Val Island still has plenty of monsters, machine and organic both, and _something _wiped out Dr. Lucerne's escort, whether enemy hunters or something else. We should play it cautiously now and not follow their lead."

"I can't argue the point. It'll mean subcontracting, though."

"This was my Christmas present to you. I don't mind giving up my share of the fee completely if I need to."

"I'm touched, Lyon. Of course, the job is personal for me, so I'd do the same, but that you'd do it for my sake... Thank you."

She felt a little embarrassed at his reaction. The gesture seemed completely sensible to her, after all, based upon her current priorities, including emotional ones. Then she realized that Ryland wasn't thanking her for her offer, not really, but for the friendship that gave rise to it.

"You're welcome," she told him softly.

"So what's the second problem?"

"Access to Gal De Val Island is controlled by the Lab. Even hunters can only go there with their approval. Which we don't have, despite working on solving the apparent murder of a Lab researcher. Chief Milarose would probably authorize it if we told her the circumstances, but...Dr. Lucerne meant the 'legacy' for his daughter, not necessarily the Lab, and as we both know how twisty and unscrupulous Chief Milarose can be there might be good reason for it. At the least, we should know what it is we've got before letting her know."

"I can't argue that," Ryland agreed. Neither one of them could talk about Natasha Milarose without recalling the way that they'd met, and how the Lab Chief had manipulated matters behind the scenes to get what she wanted—ironically, Lab control of Gal De Val Island. "We'll have to find another way."

"What kind of way? Do you know about some backdoor way onto the island?"

"No, I'm afraid not. But I do think we might be able to call in a favor."


	9. Chapter 9

Lyon hadn't seen Dr. Marc-Paul Severin since February, in connection with the hunt for the missing Rina. He looked much as she remembered him: slim, with elegant features, wavy hair the color of honey worn to just touch his shoulders, and high-quality tailored clothing beneath his open lab coat.

"Mr. Ryland, Lyon," he said. "It's been quite some time, although Rina does mention you."

Lyon nodded.

"She told me that she stays in touch with you, too."

He smiled.

"I got a Christmas card from her and her boyfriend. Would you believe that they're planning marriage?"

"Mm-hm. They told me that, too."

He shook his head.

"I must admit that when I began that particular project that domestic bliss was not one of the goals I anticipated."

"All people want fulfillment and happiness, whether human, Newman, or machine," Lyon said. "And how we define it has a lot more to do with individual traits than race."

"Even so, I can't say that I anticipated my most dramatic breakthrough in artificial intelligence to be trimming a Christmas tree while singing carols with her boyfriend," he chuckled.

"I told her that if she starts baking fruitcake that it'd be proof something really important was lost in the transition," Lyon joked.

"Oh, yes, that's a handy excuse so I wouldn't have to blame my team's programming. But, I doubt that you called to chat about old friends. What can I do for you?"

"We have a Guild Quest, and we need access to Gal De Val Island to follow up a lead."

The smile vanished from the scientist's face, replaced by a quite serious look.

"I see. Then no doubt you'd like me to arrange authorization?"

"As a project leader, you have the authority to hire hunters and send them to Ragol. You could have us do something innocuous, like check some data collection device to make sure it's functioning or whatever might be appropriate," Ryland suggested. "That would get us access to the surface."

"Of course, if you actually had something for us to do, there's no reason we couldn't double up," Lyon added. "Laying siege to a Control Tower might be pushing it, but if the job's straightforward enough..."

"Solar radiance testing in the Seaside Area, perhaps?" Severin offered, the smile reappearing.

"Ryland has been looking a little pasty, lately," Lyon returned the grin.

"Seriously, though, I need to know something about your present job if I'm going to do this."

"You know that we can't disclose a client's confidences, any more than we would yours."

"I know, but I have a duty to the Lab as well to not work against our interests. The facilities on Gal De Val were the core of _Pioneer 1_'s Lab operations, as you know, and we're still analyzing and evaluating the data from there. I can't just give you _carte blanche_ because you helped me out of a tricky situation in the past."

"I appreciate that," Ryland said. He cupped his chin in his palm, thinking. "Would you accept my assurance that our client is a private citizen rather than the military, a corporation, or the Administration?"

This was getting dicey, since they intended to recover information done by a Lab scientist on a Lab project and give it to his daughter. On the other hand, Ryland was telling the truth in that Lucerne was not representing any outside faction, only herself.

"It's a private matter, then?"

"The client's family."

Severin though about it for a few moments.

"All right," he finally decided. "Actually, I do have a job you can take care of for me. One of the bioresearch teams needs an on-site analysis station and got our section to design it. If we can put it in place, then it'll save them having to truck it down and we'll look good."

"That sounds fine. Where at?"

"The Jungle Area, north section. The project has something to do with researching the alterations to plant life and whether it's the D-Factor or a function of Ragolian native life that make Merillias and their ilk ambulatory."

"Ten meseta says it's the latter," Lyon quipped.

"No bet; the fact that the plants are divided into male and female suggests broad baseline differences before the D-Factor was introduced. I'll have the quest posted at the Guild."

"Make sure you leave it open for a full team. Our side trip will require some backup," Ryland said.

"Fine with me. Good luck on your quest."

"Thanks. Here's hoping we don't need it."

~X X X~

The Hunter's Guild main offices were located in a commercial area in the heart of _Pioneer 2_'s city and shared much of the décor with the buildings around it. The Lab, on the other hand, was in a completely different part of the ship, on the starboard side, and its ultramodern décor fit with the ship as a whole rather than the retro-industrial look of the city. Even the security had a different look, the army soldiers being replaced by uniformed Lab Internal Security grunts.

"This place always feels cramped to me," the Newman Hunter, Naomi, remarked to Lyon. She wore the skimpy outfit of most of her ilk, but her square-shouldered, thickly-muscled build made it seem more like workout gear than something designed to catch the eye. Lyon and Ryland had worked with her several times in the past, and had brought her and the hulking RAcast beside her, Gowan, in with them to act as backup.

"Ceiling: low," Gowan stated. The male android's speech pattern was due to damage he'd suffered from a computer virus when directly interfacing with the Net; repairing it would have required removing a fair amount of his memory and personal development so that he chose to live with it, especially since he was perfectly capable of writing normally.

"I agree," Ryland said. "In the city, it feels like there's an 'in' and an 'out' even though the whole thing is within the ship. Here, there's no illusion of normalcy; you _know_ you're in a man-made structure flying through space."

Lyon glanced at Gowan and shrugged.

"Organics."

"Psychology: curious."

"Har de har," drawled Naomi. "Are we going to stand here being badmouthed by a couple of glorified toasters?"

"Probably," Ryland said. "They won't get hoarse, so they can swap banter for longer than we can."

Lyon flipped his ponytail. He sneezed, signaling the end of the jokes and time for the hunters to get down to business. They approached the Guild counter, where as promised Severin had posted his job request.

"Five hundred meseta each? That's a little low for this, don't you think?" Naomi wondered as Lyon registered the team's acceptance.

"True, but giving us cover for our real job is part of the fee, too. Lyon and I get a favor and Severin gets to get his quest done at a discount."

"And it's five hundred less you need to pay us for the full run."

"A thousand, if you think about it," Ryland said. "You get five hundred directly, and I get five hundred that I can use towards defraying the cost of paying your remaining 3,500. Thanks to Severin's contribution, Lyon and I end up three thousand down instead of four."

"Ryland: upset?"

Seeing the look of confusion on the Force's face, Naomi hastened to translate. "He means does it bother you to be paying us instead of us pitching in and helping out for free as friends."

"What? No, of course not. You two are professional hunters like Lyon and I are, and we're asking you to risk your lives in combat with monsters, rogue security robots, and possibly rival hunters. She and I aren't doing it for free; we're getting paid a Guild Quest commission by a client, so why should we get paid and not you?"

"All right, so long as it's not a problem."

"Payment: delay."

"You mean, until we get our commission from our client, to hold off on giving you the three thousand Severin isn't paying until then?"

"Analysis: correct."

"But your part of the job will be done before then," Ryland protested.

"Quest: subcontracted job."

"He's right," Lyon said, coming up behind Ryland. "They're on our client's tab now. That's the way we'd do it in their place, right?"

"Right, but—"

Naomi laughed.

"Well, that puts me in my place. I was worried that he'd be mad about us getting paid at all, and instead he's upset that he can't pay us up front!"

"I'm just wondering, what if we don't successfully complete our client's job and therefore don't get paid?"

Lyon sighed.

"Don't be depressing."

"Seriously, if you don't get paid, we don't get paid, except of course for Severin's part of the quest which we'll have actually completed on his behalf. Right, Gowan?"

"Summation: accurate."

"See, Ryland, it's possible to be a professional and a friend at the same time."

"Speaking of the professional part," Lyon interjected, "we're ready to go."

The Lab's ship-to-planet teleporters weren't by the Guild, but actually located off their central command deck. Half the room was on an extension protruding out from the ship, so that the starry sky was not only outside the walls but even visible through clear panels in the floor. That part of the large room was manned by a variety of Lab workers at a console bank that ran the full U-shaped length of the room. At the other end, one could walk up to elaborate workstations for Chief Milarose, her assistant Dan, and a CALS system operator to use. All three were empty, so when the hunters arrived in the command center by warp platform they went directly to the teleporter. Lyon presented their credentials to the guard staffer, who was his usual pleasant self.

"Don't dawdle around; every minute you delay holds up vital research!"

"The Hunter's Guild should be proud of its professionalism," Naomi declared when the door to the short corridor leading to the teleporter slid closed behind them. "Think of all the Guild Quests, all the hunters that have come this way, and not once has a hunter grabbed that jerk by his ridiculous collar, dragged him to the teleporter, and hauled him down to Ragol with them. That's some iron-willed discipline right there."

As always, the four of them arrived on Gal De Val Island in the Central Control Area. A massive gate separated the transport platforms (one local, one surface-to-space) from the two control towers that reared up over the area, spires of brilliant light testifying to the arrogance of the scientists who'd attempted to tame an eternal spirit of chaos to their whims and failed. On the other sides were the deceptively placid waters of the lake formed by the huge damn that stretched between the towers, providing hydroelectric power to fuel the island complex's power needs.

"Weather: ominous," Gowan noted.

"It seems to be a localized phenomenon;" Ryland said. "The rest of the island tends to be very sunny. I used to think that it was caused somehow by the Gal Gryphons that nested in the cliffs, but it persists even after hunters defeated the adults. Probably, it's created by something in the Control Towers, some project where Photon radiation affects the weather."

"That sounds like just another reason to avoid this area. Who knows what it could do to a person?"

"Naomi: paranoid?"

"Don't push it, rustbucket."

"I don't know; you have to respect a guy who can be an effective smart-aleck while only saying two or three words at a time," Lyon pointed out.

"Let's just get going."

They used the local transporter to travel to the thickly overgrown jungle area on the north end of the island. All four of them had experience in the environment while on previous missions, some even together, and were familiar with the vagaries of the area and the kind of creatures present. Even the androids, though, found it difficult to avoid being distracted by the sheer beauty of the area, the cascading waterfalls, flowering plants, and colorful wildlife—at least, that part of the local wildlife that wasn't trying to kill them. Lyon and Naomi kept the animated plants and long-armed prowling apes away from the others while Gowan and Ryland used firearms and techniques respectively in support or to bring down the stinger-spitting Gees that swarmed from the rainforest canopy. The battles slowed them down very little; the enemies were by no means weak but the hunters moved and worked as a team to bring them down one after the other. In relatively little time they had reached Severin's target site.

"Good grief, was this a _tree_?" Naomi marveled. "It looks like a cliff wall, it's so big!"

"There's a gap here; I think we can go inside," Ryland pointed out. They entered, and found that indeed, the massive trunk of the long-dead tree had been hollowed out by natural forces over time, leaving a cylindrical shell rearing dozens of feet high, and at least a hundred feet across.

"I can't even imagine how big this tree would have been while alive," Lyon marveled. "It's amazing!"

"Nature: inspiring."

"It looks like we're not the first people to find this place," Ryland noted. "Look over there."

He was right; near the far side was a free-standing computer workstation. Lyon went over to check it out.

"I think this is from _Pioneer 1_. Some of these areas were used for experimental testing, so these local stations were used for collection, processing, and transmission of data."

"Not unlike what Severin's friends will be doing, except that their team won't be present in the field. Of course, until we clean up the mess left by Dark Falz's appearance and _Pioneer 1_'s bio-tampering, I don't think exploration and research without a strong security presence will be possible."

"Let alone settlement," Lyon agreed with her partner.

"Well, let's do our bit to help," Naomi said. "C'mon, let's get this stuff set up."

Severin's team had done a good job designing the equipment his associates would use; the components were sturdy, portable, and easily installed, making use of the latest in communications technology. They were designed to work in concert with the local CALS terminals that had been deployed, using them for their data-transmittal functions that bypassed routine BEE with the Lab's core AI's amazing capacity. It took less than ten minutes for the four of them to unload, place, and install the components, then watch it spring into life with pale blue and shimmering golden light.

"Well, that takes care of the excuse. Let's move on to the real job," Naomi summed up.

"Query: access?"

"You mean, how do we get there?"

Gowan nodded at Lyon.

"Tower security: release?"

"No, we won't need to get past the gate. The target site is in the Central Control Area, but it's an underground facility not connected to the Control Towers. We have a direct access code to connect the local teleporter to its arrival teleporter, so we won't have to take a more direct path down through the control tower facilities."

Naomi gave a sigh of relief. She had no desire to go tramping all over the island looking for the security controls necessary to get past the CCA's main gate.

"All right, then. Things are looking up."

They retraced their steps through the jungle and soon were back on the mist-shrouded platform under the stormy sky. Lyon set the teleporter controls to the coordinates Lucerne had provided them, then prompted it with the access code. The screen flashed _Accepted: Access set for Research and Testing Facility #3 (Dam)._

"After you," she said to Ryland. The others followed the Force, and after a moment of transition they found themselves stepping through the teleporter's pulsing blue perimeter field into the arrival chamber. The room was small and octagonal, with white metal walls striped by blue-green energy conduits running horizontally. The only thing in the room besides the teleporter pad was a fixed terminal connected to the platform. Lyon checked it quickly.

"No, this is strictly a control panel for the teleporter; it doesn't have any greater function."

"Nor any reason to," Ryland noted.

"Okay, just so we've got this straight," Naomi spoke up as they began their preparations, "this is a follow-up after a Lab scientist and a hunter escort were killed here?"

"That's right," Ryland said, even as he was preparing the team with Shifta and Deband. "According to our client's information, the party was ambushed and only one member of the team survived."

"Ambushed by what?"

"I don't know. It's claimed that it was by people, but I can't be certain of the truth. The survivor was killed back on _Pioneer 2_ in a bar brawl we think was staged."

Naomi whistled.

"Better watch our backs, then. But it's a computer you're looking for, right? The one the expedition was using?"

"Right. It could be one of this installation's units, if any are intact, or it could be something they brought down with them. We'll just have to explore thoroughly and check out everything until we find it."

"Got it." She sighed. "SOP for a Guild Quest, then. Clear the area, look for the target at the end."

"Naomi: cynical."

The Newman snorted.

"Aw, c'mon, you old rust-bucket. You know as well as I do that three-fourths of jobs consist of 'go to X and bring back Y' and the ones that don't are usually 'go to X and kill everything hostile there in Z time limit.' This isn't anything different except we're doing it for a friend."

"Summation: accurate."

"Darned right."

"This is about where I would be flipping Ryland's ponytail," Lyon told her fellow android.

"Organics: humor overestimation."

"Who'd have known bad jokes would be the last refuge of the biological brain against mechanical replacement?" Ryland said with a grin.

"If that's the one thing we can't duplicate, it's no wonder they _did_ create us."

"I stand corrected."

"Mission: commencing?" Gowan nudged.

"He has a point. We'd better get going before I have to refresh the support techniques."

Lyon and Naomi led the way forward through the heavy sliding door into a long corridor with the same general décor as the teleporter room, except for the left-hand wall, which was pierced by a series of oblong windows. Outside them, water rushed past in torrents, far fiercer than any hurricane. Eerily, there was no sound from the waterfall; the insulation of wall and window was absolute.

"We're actually inside the dam!" Lyon was impressed despite herself. "That must be what the area name meant; it was a literal description instead of just a general area."

"Is it part of the generating plant?"

"Probably not," Ryland said. "_Pioneer 1_'s Lab wasn't exactly sensible when it came to safety and stability in area design, but I'd think even they wouldn't do weapons research in an area directly connected to a power plant. Just having them nearby would be bad enough."

"Surroundings: test area."

"Good point; this was probably just used for research and development; they'd use the Jungle, Mountain, and Seaside Areas for large-scale test sites. We already know the biosciences researchers did that."

They proceeded down the hall, which showed no signs of violence or other reasons to suspect that anything was amiss. After about thinly feet, they reached a T-intersection, the corridor continuing straight ahead to a closed door lit with a green light while a branch passage ran to the right. That door showed red lights, suggesting that it was sealed for security reasons.

"Straight ahead it is," Lyon said pragmatically. "I wonder why that door is locked, though. Dr. Lucerne's team would have had the area open, I'd have thought."

"Maybe it leads somewhere they didn't need to go, or maybe it just couldn't be opened from this side," Naomi made a few fairly innocuous suggestions. Ryland's ideas weren't anywhere near as nice.

"If there was a monster outbreak, security sensors might have sealed certain doors automatically to keep the creatures inside. Or Dorn might have retreated this way and locked it himself so he'd have free access to the teleporter while the attacks would have to use Ryuker or telepipes to make their escape."

"Probably, this facility is just in security mode since the explosion like everything else on the planet," Lyon split the difference. "With the AI Olga destroyed, there's no way to rescind the status, so the door locks, laser barriers, and so on reset themselves over time. Which isn't actually a bad thing, given how the monsters did too, at least while Dark Falz was still active. To say nothing of the security robots, whether infected by D-Factor, guided by a corrupted Olga when it was active, or just hostile to us because we're not _Pioneer 1_ Lab staff and without a system core can't tell them otherwise." There were a lot of possibilities as to why Sinow Berills and Sinow Spigells were a regular hazard on Gal De Val Island. "In any case, Naomi had it right."

"Oh?"

"It doesn't matter why there are sealed doors. We press on, we clear out the place, and with any kind of luck we find what we're looking for at the end."


	10. Chapter 10

The room at the end of the corridor was roughly the same size as the one the hunters had arrived in, but included two computer terminals. One was the small, waist-height workstation common to Gal De Val Island, while the other was a bulkier, block-like one more like the ones in No Man's Mines. Gowan stepped over to the latter unit while Lyon took the smaller, less complex one.

"Data: negative."

"Do you mean there's nothing there at all? Or that it wasn't the kind of activity that we're looking for?"

Gowan looked at Ryland for a moment, then reached for the navigation unit on his left wrist and began typing. A moment later, Ryland's own unit beeped.

"Simple-mail? Oh, I see. 'This machine has been accessed within the past week, but has not been used for the transmission or copying of data. The local data appears to be concerned with facility management rather than research.' Does that mean you can find a map of this place?"

Gowan returned his attention to the computer. A moment later, the largest screen on the machine shifted images to display a sketchwork map of the area.

"Download: commencing," he announced, sending the data to his nav unit.

"That was handy," Naomi said. "Usually we have to go in blind or by memory. Did you find anything over there, Lyon?"

"Just the door control." She touched it, switching a panel light from red to green. "Let's go."

They went back to the intersection and took the branch path away from the dam face. As expected, the door slid open at their approach, leading to a large lobby-like area, with plants under glass and five other exits. There were few signs of violence, and the hunters moved through the complex with the unusual experience of _not_ meeting any hostile encounters.

"I can see why there wouldn't be any animals or D-cellular sub lifeforms," Lyon said, confused, after verifying that the fifth room was indeed empty, even of camouflaged Sinow robots, "but there should be security robots, shouldn't there?"

"Not without some way for them to get in. This isn't like the Seabed facility or the outdoors of the island; the automated factories would keep generating robots until shut down, but there's no way from there to here," Ryland deduced. "Dr. Lucerne's team probably cleared whatever they found left over from _Pioneer 1,_ and there's been no way to replace those guards."

"Okay, I'll buy that."

They explored what looked like test chambers, where observers could watch experiments from behind barriers of reinforced barrier plastiglass, often smoked or with altering polarization to deal with bright flashes, material that resembled that of the dome surrounding _Pioneer 2_'s city although on a much smaller scale. In one place, a large room led to a kind of gantry with metal grill catwalks over the huge generators and Photon converters of the hydroelectric plant several levels down; the scale of it was amazing, especially when one considered that the entire facility on Gal De Val Island had been kept secret from the bulk of _Pioneer 1_'s civilian population. No matter how many times she saw the evidence, Lyon never seemed to stop being overcome by the lengths Dr. Osto and his staff had gone in pursuit of the secrets of Photon energy and the D-Factor...and the lack of any restraint imposed by ethics or sanity on those lengths.

As they progressed, the paused to check out every working computer terminal they located. More than once Gowan discovered that data had been examined or downloaded from it, consistent with the pattern of an exploration trip, but no sign of any transmission to a remote location of the kind that they were seeking.

Then they entered another long, featureless corridor, only to be greeted by the sight of a body sprawled face-down across the way. The hunters didn't need Naomi's caution to keep an eye out; if anything their watchfulness increased as they approached the fallen figure. The corpse appeared to be a male Newman, his platform shoes, stiff brocade coat, and jester-like tasseled cap suggesting that he'd been a Force. That the body _was_ a corpse wasn't in doubt; he'd been dead for several days and decomposition had set in. The cause of death seemed self-evident; he'd been stabbed in the back, the scorching suggesting it had been a Photon blade rather than a physical one—a weapon, not a creature's claws.

Lyon and Gowan turned the body over; he'd been a registered hunter as shown by his Section ID badge. She accessed it.

"His name was Robin Vance," she said. "That was one of the hunters on Dr. Lucerne's expedition team."

"This bears out the tale of an ambush," Ryland said. "A surprise attack to take out the Force before the battle begins would certainly be a sensible tactic. Though I would have expected a long-range attack, a gunshot or technique, not a stab wound. How does an enemy get that close to a trained hunter in a narrow corridor like this?"

"Good question. It makes me worry that somebody's finally made Photon camouflage units that work for people."

"Thankfully that's still an urban legend, Naomi, but I wouldn't be surprised if several research teams were working on it even as we speak."

"Ryland," Lyon cut in, "there's something wrong here."

"Oh?"

It took him a couple of seconds, since he didn't have the benefit of an STM buffer containing the precise data for replay. Still, he got it with her reminder, his eyes widening behind his spectacles.

"He wasn't shot."

"Observation: repetitious."

"That's not what he means, Gowan," Lyon corrected the assumption. "The survivor's report on the ambush specifically said that the FOnewm had been taken out first, first paralyzed and then killed by _shots_."

"Sounds to me like your survivor's report consists of bald-faced lies."

"Truth rests more comfortably in the hands of sole survivors," Lyon's cynicism followed up on Naomi's. "And Dorn was a Hunter, so he'd be used to making close-range attacks."

That certainly fit with their initial cynicism and suspicion, but it did not satisfy. The Dorn that Wayland Parr and Coris had described wasn't a man who'd ambush his team and assassinate his sponsor—or if by some twist of events he did, it would be for some powerful, personal reason, not something that would have him slipping back to _Pioneer 2_ only to get offed by his old friends in a business deal gone bad.

Something was missing. She shared a look with Ryland.

"Let's keep going," he agreed.

They tagged the body for corpse retrieval so that it could be returned to the ship by the Guild and a proper funeral held. Maybe Vance had had someone to care for him and maybe not, but as hunters, all four of them knew they'd want the same done for them. Then, they went on down the corridor and into the next room.

This was it.

The oblong room was a laboratory, probably the control and monitoring room for experiments, judging by the way a "bubble" protruded out of one side like a bow window overlooking what was probably a test chamber that they'd actually been in earlier in their explorations. Computers were on, with data scrolling across the screens, charts and graphs. That was unusual; the computers in No Man's Mines were like that because the area AI, Vol Opt, was still active although corrupted, but the Gal De Val AI, Olga, had been destroyed with Heathcliff Flowen. These computers had been recently activated.

What clinched the point, however, was not any of the machines from the original facility, but one that had been added. It looked like a floating gold ring, with panels of blue light above and below so that the whole thing seemed vaguely like a crown, if Lyon was forced to compare it to anything. It was a CALS terminal, an extension of the Lab mainframe on _Pioneer 2_ used as a data interface and communication system by hunters on Lab missions so they could communicate with their operator on the ship. Its existence was clear proof that Lab-backed activity had taken place here—and after all, why would Dr. Lucerne use a local computer if he had access to technology created for his precise purpose?

And then there were the bodies.

"Deceased: expected?"

"Possibly," Ryland said. "A female android and a Newman in a white lab coat. That matches with two of the people we believed we'd find."

"Let's check and be sure," Lyon said.

The Newman looked to be in his fifties, with long silver hair. His identification confirmed that he was indeed Dr. Kylan Lucerne of the Lab. His death appeared to have come quickly.

"One shot, probably a handgun-type weapon," Lyon observed.

"Are you sure? It couldn't have been a rifle?"

"Androids don't have confirmation bias, Ryland," Lyon said. "And I said it was possibly a handgun, not that it was absolutely so."

"I apologize. It just seemed to be coming too easily."

"Query: confirmation?"

"The use of a handgun to kill Dr. Lucerne suggests a Hunter, rather than a Ranger or Force, and Barton Dorn was a Hunter," Ryland explained. "When you consider that Dorn was the sole survivor of the expedition team, and that what we've found doesn't match up at all with what he told our client...well, it's easy to have certain suspicions."

Naomi snorted.

"Yeah, I bet. Well, if this guy got it clean and neat, that android definitely didn't."

Sif-04A was a Type-S/F Ranger model, a series that was Weinstine Co.'s predecessor to the more advanced L/Ys like Lyon. She'd fought valiantly against whatever or whomever had attacked her, as indicated by the several injuries from Photon blades that marked her carapace and the saber that lay near her. Both the main control in her body and the core unit in her head had been destroyed, and her left arm severed.

"What do you think?" Lyon asked. "After getting rid of Vance in the hall, Dorn came in here, put Lucerne down, and Sif attacked him, in self-defense and to try and get Dr. Lucerne a Moon Atomizer to keep him from dying?"

"It could be," Ryland said. "We'll probably never know the exact sequence of events but that sounds as reasonable as any."

"Then why kill Dorn?" Lyon wondered.

"Maybe because he didn't get what he came for?"

"Dr. Lucerne sent a message?"

"He's lying almost underneath the CALS terminal. That wound would have been fatal, but not immediately."

"So while Sif was fighting Dorn, keeping Dorn from doing anything else but fend her off, the dying Dr. Lucerne sent his data somewhere using this CALS terminal?"

Ryland nodded.

"We'll probably never know every detail, but I think it was probably _something_ along those lines. Gowan?"

"Transmission: verifiable."

He stepped over to the CALS terminal and accessed it, using the details of the cover mission they were working for Dr. Severin to verify that he was in fact entitled to connect to the terminal. In a few moments, he'd pulled up the record, and once again sent a simple-mail.

"All right, then. According to Gowan, five days ago at 816.1, a compressed-burst transmission uploaded a large data file from here directly to CALS. This was a pre-set operation requiring only a single command to execute," Ryland summarized.

"Probably an emergency backup plan," Lyon decided. "In the event of a crisis, his data could be instantly sent on. The data was one day before Dorn's murder, as well, suggesting that trouble finally caught up with him."

"I agree, but I'd like to verify that. Is there any way to corroborate that the transmission was sent by Dr. Lucerne?"

Lyon glanced at Gowan.

"Can you verify Sif-04A's shutdown time?"

"Operation: possible."

The two organics looked at her curiously.

"What are you thinking, Lyon?"

"Most android parts, as you know, are interchangeable. An android's 'self' is in their core, of course, and the main control in the body is what allows it to operate, but limbs and the like retain their own sub-processors. So while Sif is dead and her memories of the incident destroyed, since her body is mostly intact, Gowan can check on when the limbs stopped receiving commands from the main control—the precise time of death."

"I see. That's excellent thinking."

Lyon shrugged.

"Just self-knowledge."

The hulking RAcast, meanwhile, had knelt down next to the fallen android. With surprisingly deft movements, he connected a thin cable to the base of his neck and then ran it to a panel on Sif's still-connected wrist. Lyon couldn't help but wince whenever she saw that; it was why she'd asked Gowan to do something she could handle perfectly well herself. Despite the damage he'd suffered, _he_ had no phobia about linking directly to other computer systems, while Lyon had no desire to open herself to potential hacking or viruses if she could avoid it.

"Shutdown: 816.2," Gowan reported. He moved on to the legs and repeated the same result from each, establishing that this was the time the main control had been destroyed.

"That sounds like your scenario was right, Lyon," Naomi said. "Dr. Lucerne was shot first, and then sent the transmission while Sif fought the killer. But hey, why didn't the killer just steal whatever data it was off the CALS terminal after the fight?"

"Data: erased."

"The program to send the transmission also wiped local data?" Ryland questioned the RAcast's meaning.

"Supposition: accurate."

"Which makes sense, since the point is to keep the data away from the people attacking them."

"So is that it, then? We're done here?" Naomi asked.

"No, let's do this right. We finish properly, making sure no other computers around here did anything, and also looking for the fourth missing member of the expedition."

"Cyndra Vallere," Lyon provided. "You're right, Ryland. We're probably only going to get one chance down here, and we don't want to risk leaving any clues to this mess behind us."

As it turned out, though, the only thing they gained by finishing the job was certainty, because there was nothing useful to be learned and no sign of the remaining hunter's body. Unless she'd gone over the catwalk and was hidden by the generating plant, Lyon thought, she wasn't there to be found. Nor had any of the computers turned up anything interesting; maybe there was something, but it was for scientific experts to sift through and tell the wheat from the chaff, not hunters. The point that mattered to them was that none of them had been used as a computer by Dr. Lucerne, only being sources of stored data to access. As for surprising developments, there were none of those as well, not even a Sinow Berill dropping from the ceiling in the last room.

They teleported back to the Guild using Ryuker, rather than walking all the way back to the facility entrance and using the Central Control Area teleporter. They reported in at the Guild, collecting their fee and reporting the tagged bodies of Vance, Sif, and Dr. Lucerne so the recovery teleporters could bring them back.

"Let us know how it turns out, if you can," Naomi told Ryland as they parted ways.

"If we show up to pay you the back-end money, you'll know," Lyon told her, making the brawny Newman roll her eyes.

"That's just what I meant and you know it. You two always get the interesting jobs."

"You put her up to saying that, didn't you?" Lyon joked to her partner, but Ryland seemed passive.

"Sometimes, they turn out a little too interesting," he said softly.

~X X X~

"So that's it?" Kendric said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. "You go down to Ragol and all you find is that a Lab scientist reported Lab business back to the Lab while he and a couple of hunters were being murdered? How does that help us?"

Ryland poured coffee into a mug. Since Kendric was staying over while this was going on, Lyon had laid in food and her partner was quickly taking advantage of it.

"There's quite a lot more to it than that," Ryland said. "For example, the first statement is perfectly untrue."

"What?"

"About Dr. Lucerne reporting to the Lab." He walked back over to the living area and sat down. "I'm quite sure that he didn't."

"Why not?"

Ryland turned to his partner.

"Can you tell him, Lyon?"

She stared at him, but he didn't so much as glance away from her blank, blue-light eyes.

"Are we really playing detective games over this?"

He shook his head.

"No games. I really want to know if you see the same things that I do. If not, then I get worried I'm letting my imagination get ahead of itself." He glanced at Kendric, wishing it was only Lyon in the room, then sucked it up and admitted, "You know that I like mysteries and conspiracy stories, but the problem with that is, I very quickly _see_ mysteries and conspiracies, sometimes even where there aren't any."

"I don't think you've got that problem just now, Donny," Kendric said dryly. "I think it's pretty clear we've got something going on here."

"That's it!" Lyon exclaimed. "We _do_ have something going on, and _that's_ why you don't think Dr. Lucerne reported in to the Lab."

Ryland sipped coffee. It wasn't as good as his favorite, but it was worlds ahead of the Blue Grotto's.

"Yes, exactly."

"Great, now I feel like the prize idiot," Kendric groused. "Mind telling me what I'm missing, or do we have to keep playing the party game until all of us figure it out?"

"The operation to seize Dr. Lucerne's data is still running. The Slashers attacked Justine, were spying on you and Eddy, murdered Barton Dorn, and so on in order to try and finish it off. If Dr. Lucerne had simply sent his research data to his Lab superiors, there'd be nothing for criminals or other factions to try to get—at least, not this way."

"Did the buyer know that, though?" Lyon asked. "Maybe Dorn was stringing him along, in the hope of getting a payout?"

"Was this Dorn guy _that_ stupid?" Kendric asked. "You don't backstab someone unless you've got someone else to protect you or somewhere to run—and on _Pioneer 2_, there's nowhere to run _to_. You can't just leave the country like on Coral. It's one thing if he was a spy for the military or if the guy he was screwing over was a fellow hunter or something so he could go hide in Downtown, but doublecrossing someone on a criminal deal over Lab data just to pocket some cash?" He shook his head. "That'd just be nuts."

"I tend to agree," Ryland said. "A man who'd been a street gang member, then a successful hunter, would know that."

"Okay, I'll buy that," Lyon decided.

"So, we can assume that the data was _not_ sent to Chief Milarose or some other Lab administrator. A verifying point is that we're not tripping over IntSec in all of this. Chief Milarose would definitely _not_ let someone murdering a Lab scientist to steal data go unchallenged. If Dr. Lucerne had gotten the data back, she would have sent Internal Security agents or their hunters to find the responsible parties and teach them a very pointed lesson. But we haven't crossed paths with such a group even once."

Kendric spoke up to play devil's advocate.

"Haven't we? Remember what I said, the only way I think someone could be running electronic surveillance would be with a high-grade AI. That Lab chief has the only one we know exists, that CALS system."

"Possibly, but there still haven't been any living people involved. You're right that CALS could handle the surveillance, but there would still have to be follow-ups in the physical world."

"All right; just figured I'd mention it."

"I'm not upset; if my logic has holes, it's good to say so now before we depend on it." He lifted the cup to his lips and sipped. "Now, on to the next point Kendric's summary missed: we have an obvious loose end in Cyndra Vallere." He turned to the entertainment center and touched a remote, which called up a video image he'd managed to obtain of a Newman female in the typical skimpy outfit of a HUnewearl like Naomi, her bright blue hair moussed up in tall spikes and a visor-like eyepiece not unlike Wayland Parr had worn, her pale skin marked by gleaming light-gel tattoos on the upper arms and shoulders. "We found the bodies of the other two hunters, so why not her? Is she dead, too, but somewhere else—back on _Pioneer 2_ like Dorn? If so, why haven't we heard about her? Is she in hiding from the killers? Or was she in on the killings? She's a question mark, and figuring out how she fits in is very likely important."

"We'll have to check with Guild contacts like your friend Talissa about her," Lyon said.

"Anywhere else I screwed up and you learned something?" Kendric drawled. He sounded a bit better about it. It was, after all, his own situation more than either hunter's they were talking about, so Lyon figured he found it galling that he was being dismissive of efforts that had actually proven to be helpful. Maybe Ryland saw it too, as when he answered he did so hesitantly, at least at first.

"...Actually, there is one other thing. When Revelle Lucerne hired us, she showed us the report on the expedition's fate that Barton Dorn had sent her by simple-mail. While there were some similarities, the report was ultimately quite inaccurate for what we found."

"It was a lie?"

"Yes, but more than that it was a clumsy lie, one easy to catch him out at. Wouldn't Dorn expect a follow-up investigation to be made, if not by Lucerne, then at least by the Lab? I don't see what he had to gain by telling a story so obviously at odds with the facts."

"So do you know the answer to that one?"

"No. Well...maybe. I have an idea. You were able to hack into Lucerne's PDL before, weren't you, when you were looking for signs of surveillance?"

"Yes, I was."

"Then can you see if you can do it again? I'd like to know when she got those messages and if possible, who actually sent them."

"The first one I can do; the second probably not as it would involve hacking the BEE transmission network."

"Get me what you can. Meanwhile, Lyon and I will follow up the second point, Cyndra Vallere, with our friends and contacts in the Guild."

"Okay...wait, but what about the big point? Dr. Lucerne transmitted the data to the Lab's AI but you don't think that the Lab got it? Shouldn't at least one of us be looking into that?"

Ryland smiled at him over the lip of the coffee mug.

"Oh, there's no need to go researching that. I already know where Dr. Lucerne put the data."


	11. Chapter 11

The tang of salt was in the air, swept in by tropical winds from the green-blue sea that surrounded them. The warmth of the afternoon sun was gentle, playing pleasantly on the skin.

It was hard to remember, Ryland thought, that it was all an illusion.

The Lab's virtual reality system was an incredible piece of work. Within what was ordinarily an empty room, it created artificial environments, physical constructs of Photon energy in realspace. Architecture, objects, creatures, all described as data and then manifested through the miracle of Photon technology. This wasn't VR in the common sense, where artificial stimuli were fed to the brain; there were actual, physical constructs that existed in the world, albeit within the specialized construct of the VR arena.

Ryland couldn't help wondering if some day in the future, it would be possible to have a system where such things could be created in the real world without the specialized environment, where a hunter in the field could have a particular weapon sent to them by an operator at a base site in response to a specific threat, for example. It was all yet another of the things that convinced him that "Photon" was nothing more or less than magic.

The VR system was the exclusive property of the Lab. It wasn't that they were hoarding the technology (although they might seek to do so if given the chance, people being what they were), but that their CALS was the only computer on _Pioneer 2_ with the capacity to handle the immense processing needs of maintaining the virtual environment.

"This is where Father's legacy can be found?"

Revelle Lucerne fumbled nervously with the Varista. A high-grade handgun (actually better than the railgun Lyon carried, which no doubt irked the android), the weapon was the standard model which the Lab offered to its scientists for dangerous field operations. This gun was actually Dr. Lucerne's, brought back when the body had been retrieved.

"Look around you," Ryland said.

For Ryland and Lyon, the VR environment called the Temple was familiar. It was used as a testing ground for recruiting hunters for Lab missions to establish minimum qualifications, and made available to said hunters for training and practice. Lucerne, though, was very likely seeing it for the first time, a sprawling complex of sand-colored stone, carved pillars, and rearing shrines, some crumbling into ruin with broken walls, toppled columns, open ceilings, weed-choked flagstones, and whole sections drowned beneath the encroaching sea.

"The Temple environment is actually based—with modifications, of course—on an archaeological site on Coral on the Tor Malisite coastline. Thousands of years ago, this was the centerpiece of an ancient culture and the worship of its gods." He laid a hand on one of the pillars. "Then time and politics pressed on, and it became a relic of the past, and the damage we'd inflicted on the environment caused climate change, and the sea came in to swallow it. If predictions are accurate, continued erosion might have caused it to sink and be destroyed by now."

He looked back over his shoulder at Lucerne.

"You see, now, what your father's message meant? These truly are the ruins of our past, and since the VR system is for use only by hunters, that's why you would need one to help you. Or perhaps it was just a reference to how a team would need to back you up to deal with the threats; the system is designed to automatically eject anyone who is injured beyond a certain threshold, but serious harm or even death are both possible. The creatures here are similar in power to those found on Ragol, after all."

"Creatures?" Lucerne asked. "Is that why..." She lifted the gun in her hands slightly while looking down at it.

"Exactly," Lyon said. "The combat training that happens here used VR versions of Ragol's monsters, since that's what we hunters have to fight most often while carrying out our work."

"Is...is it safe?"

"Yes, within reason."

She shuffled her feet. Lucerne wore a long-sleeved, flare-waisted jacket with a miniskirt-length hem over green leggings that shimmered with an ornate pattern. The outfit was clearly civilian, reminding Ryland of the non-scientist staffers that worked in the Lab section of the ship as opposed to a formal lab associate like the uniformed workers.

"The data was sent by Dr. Lucerne to CALS in a compressed-burst transmission, but not communicated to the Lab hierarchy," he continued. "I think he set it up in advance—as a scientist, he had legitimate access to CALS, and as a weapons researcher maybe even set up his own VR environments for testing. The data was received and stored here, to be retrieved later."

"But why would Father do that, Mr. Ryland?"

"We can't be sure, but my best guess is that it was as an emergency backup in case of factional strife. Remember, he only sent the information here when he was under threat of immediate death. If nothing had happened, I suspect he'd have just reported his findings in the customary manner, but this trick enabled him to leave the information where you, personally, were needed to get at it, so that you could use it to your benefit instead of letting it fall into the hands of various rivals, possibly including Lab scientists working in secret for the military or worse."

"Now, we just have to retrieve it," Lyon said.

The Dimenians jumped them in the very first room past the entrance, strange, roughly humanoid black creatures studded with the luminescent patches that were the trademark of D-cellular sub lifeforms and arms that turned into cleaver-like blades below the elbow. The only pleasant thing about the swarming creatures was that their bio-luminescence was color-coded for the hunters' convenience: blue for Dimenians, magenta for stronger, faster La Dimenians, and yellow for the strongest So Dimenians, thus allowing them to choose their tactics (and Ryland his techniques) for maximum efficiency.

They needed the edge, because the monsters came fast and furiously, new waves being created by CALS as each previous one was felled.

"That wasn't pretty," Lyon muttered as she cut down the last one. Ryland guessed the android would have been leaning on her partisan to catch her breath had she been human or Newman. The rapid-fire technique use had taken a lot out of him, as well, and he used a couple of Difluids to restore his capacity.

"If...if I'd tried to come in here without you, I'd have been killed!" Lucerne gaped. She'd fired freely into the mass of swarming creatures during the battle, chipping in while remaining safely behind her escort. Ryland appreciated that; too many "escort missions" he'd been on assumed an added level of difficulty when the person being escorted insisted on flinging themselves into close combat or otherwise ignoring their bodyguards' advice.

"It's probably a security measure, to doubly protect the data," Ryland said.

"That's silly," Lyon was less than sympathetic to the suggestion. "The point is that _this_ version of the Temple, the one where Dr. Lucerne's data can be accessed, only appears when an appropriate ID is logged in as one of the participants. Loading it up with added challenges just makes it harder for our client."

Ryland nodded.

"It would be foolish. But then again, that sort of thing happens when amateurs design security measures. Too often, they consider only the individual obstacles instead of their purpose."

"That's true enough. Shall we move on?"

The next room looked to be some kind of temple courtyard, with two rows of columns leading up to a series of steps and a kind of altar-like sculpture that rose against the back wall. Ryland wondered if, in its original version, the room had once had a ceiling and had served as a sanctuary for services, or had always been outdoors beneath the sky, and what that meant for the beliefs and practices of its builders. Now, it was all just a ghost, a monument to the forgotten memories of a forgotten people.

He himself, though, was not forgotten, nor was his business here. He supposed it was the nature of that business as much as his own interests that made his mind so eager to lose itself in speculations about a comfortably vanished past.

Lyon stepped forward, gungnir at the ready, and the next wave of attackers appeared.

As the Dimenians advanced, a loud buzzing sound could be heard, and at the far end of the court a bulbous, pitcher-like structure descended, carried by insects not unlike mosquitoes if mosquitoes were a meter long. Even as Ryland caught the advancing monsters with the Jellen technique to sap their strength, he watched more Mothmants spit themselves out of the nest-like Monest and hurl towards fresh prey.

Fire exploded among the Dimenians, consuming the first wave of Mothmants as well in Ryland's technique and a second casting finished the Dimenians as well. As the last of the sub lifeforms fell, another creature of the darkness shimmered into place, a Dark Belra, looking like a twenty-foot-tall animated clay sculpture. Its steps were lumbering, but it had another weapon to make up for its lack of mobility: it raised its three-clawed arm and suddenly its "hand" launched itself like a rocket.

"Look out!" Lyon exclaimed and dove at Lucerne, her metal hand closing on the Newman's jacket and pulling her to the ground, just in the nick of time.

A Mothmant was diving at the prone woman, but Lucerne rolled to her side and fired twice, catching the creature in mid-flight and sniping it out of the air. While she and Lyon swatted bugs, Ryland locked in on the Belra and blew it away with an explosion of light from the Grants technique. With the Mothmants dead, the nest was defenseless and the hunters soon had the room cleared.

On the altar, a glowing orb appeared, a common symbol in the VR system for a quest's goal, something to be retrieved.

"That's it, then," Ryland said. "That's what it's all been about. All the killings, all the violence, all the scheming and spying."

Lucerne gave him a curious look.

"Aren't you happy that your deduction was right?"

He supposed he should be. Certainly, that was the normal way of things, especially after a job with as many twists and turns as this one had, but he didn't. He felt drained, almost empty. Part of that was Kendric, of course, and what had happened with Justine. There was no way to get around the impact that had had. But that wasn't all. Dr. Lucerne, the death of a mind which had apparently believed some of the same things he had, striven towards the same goals, that was a tragedy by itself.

And the circumstances of it...

No, it was no surprise that he felt this way. There was no conveniently happy ending for this job the way there had been for the Valentine's Day case. Oh, there would be justice, he hoped, or at least vengeance, but that wasn't _winning_. It was just...balancing the scales, canceling out the losses, at best.

"I'm glad that we didn't fail," was the only answer he knew was true.

She nodded, then turned towards the steps, ascending them one by one. She bent and touched the glow; it vanished, but her PDL beeped and she took it out.

"It's asking me to accept a data transfer?"

"An automated response from CALS."

Lucerne touched the device and the download began. A few moments later, the PDL beeped again. Her face lit up.

"That's it!" she said excitedly, looking through the data. "This is my father's work! Collected weapons research from _Pioneer 1_, together with his own notes and annotations. You've done it!"

Ryland nodded.

"Of course you're excited. After all, when you commit murder, but can't actually achieve what you killed for...well, that must be awfully frustrating, Ms. Lucerne, or should I say, Ms. Vallere."

She didn't try to protest or stand around stunned, he had to give her that. Her reflexes were fast and her brain adapted quickly to the new situation. Her hand came up with the Varista, but Lyon's gungnir descended, the blade striking the weapon and tearing it from Lucerne's hand to go skittering over the flagstones.

"Oh, please give me an excuse," the android said. "The down side to using your civilian identity is that you're stuck wearing a civilian frame, not the equipment a professional hunter would wear. You don't stand a chance against us."

"Look, we can deal. We have the data now. I've got a buyer lined up."

"Who? Not the army or Black Paper, or else you'd have had their backup instead of hiring us."

"Mick Co., the arms manufacturer. Their local rep doesn't like playing third fiddle in their own field to Weinstine and P2E, and figured that if they could apply _Pioneer 1_ experimental research, pretend to have discovered it, and go to market, they'll have a good chance of picking up business from the military and hunters alike. I'm serious, here; I'll cut the two of you in for an added share."

Lyon glanced at Ryland.

"She can't possibly think that we'd accept that?"

"It makes more sense than holding out, letting us kill her for it in a 'training accident' and sell it ourselves. Particularly when you consider that she already knows that Kendric and I are looking for revenge."

Lucerne again proved that she was quick-thinking, though, when in the moment the hunters' eyes were on each other, she pulled an emergency telepipe from her pocket and triggered it.

Or at least, she tried to.

"Nice try, but teleportation out is being blocked," Ryland told her.

"You can think of us as the boss for this stage," Lyon added.

Their ex-client's gaze went from one to the other like a hunted animal, constantly watching for a means of escape.

"How did you know?"

"Cyndra Vallere was missing," Ryland said.

She scowled.

"I should never have given you the team names."

"No, you had to. We could have found out from other sources, and if you'd lied to us it would have looked very bad. And you don't look all that much alike in the two identities: Vallere used spiky blue hair and dressed in skimpy outfits that showed off her arms, legs, and back. They also showed off her light-gel tattoos, which are Slashers gang colors; like Dorn, she was—you are—an ex-Slasher. A better set of pictures, especially without that mask-like visor you would wear, would have let Lyon compare the details of 'Cyndra's' face with 'Revelle Lucerne's.' To an android the tricks that confuse an organic's perception of disguise don't work as well. But Kendric did manage to get us one image to back up the description."

Lucerne's scowl deepened.

"And _that_ was enough?"

Lyon nodded.

"Of course."

"The problem was Barton Dorn," Ryland said. "What we could never pin down were his loyalties. Was he with the Slashers, still involved in the attack on your father? If so, why did they kill him? And why would he betray Dr. Lucerne? Was he loyal to your father? If so, why not report to Lab authorities? And why send you those simple-mails telling a lying story about what happened? We'll get back to those, by the way.

"When we found out that Cyndra Vallere, the missing member of the team, was an ex-Slasher, though, it all made sense. Dorn's loyalties were confusing because they were divided. You stabbed Vance in the back, then went into the next room and shot Dr. Lucerne. Dorn probably watched you do it, but had no idea you planned it and so was taken completely by surprise—of all people, he'd know of your dual identity, and so would be taken off-guard. He probably stood there, dumbstruck, while it all happened. Or was he out on patrol at the time?"

"He came in just as I was finishing off Sif. The old man was dead already."

"I see. And he thought it was personal, not Slashers gang business."

She actually growled at him, like a feral animal.

"It _was_ personal. That bastard never gave a damn about me or my mother while she was alive. She was a four-month fling for him, a bar-girl he'd dated while he was a graduate student, but once he got his degree he left her without a second thought to take a fancy job in another country. He'd been gone two months before she even knew the damned contraceptives hadn't worked. They don't always on Newmen, you know, with our hybrid biology. She had no way to contact him and no desire to, after he'd dumped her by a goddamn text message!"

Lucerne's hands curled into fists.

"It was blind coincidence we both ended up on _Pioneer 2_. I saw him when he was slumming Downtown, looking for a piece of cheap tail. I guess that hadn't changed over the years. I wanted to vomit at the sight of it, but then I figured, hell, why shouldn't I get mine? So I went right up to him and introduced myself. Bart Dorn was my witness, and got a record of the meeting, just in case dear Daddy decided I should 'disappear' instead of causing trouble. Of course, he insisted on genetic testing to make sure I wasn't lying, but when that proved we really were father and daughter he didn't have an out."

"Why the second identity, though?" Lyon asked. "Why create 'Revelle Lucerne' instead of introducing you for who you were?"

The Newman snorted.

"Kylan Lucerne admit that a ganger-girl was his daughter? Oh, no, that would have damaged his standing in the scientific community! He might have had his pure and spotless reputation speckled by it! So he hooked up with his Administration contacts to build me a fake identity as the legitimate daughter of a poor, deceased wife from long ago. It's not like anyone would be able to check back on Coral to make sure there'd even been a marriage, particularly with the amount of records lost in the war years."

"So you became Revelle Lucerne, but also kept up as Cyndra Vallere, even became a hunter with your father's help. And I assume he sponsored Dorn as well because Dorn knew the truth."

"Exactly. Only Bart figured I was just going to soak the old man, live it up to make up for the years of doing without. _He—_Bart—figured it was his big chance to go legit, be a real hunter and make something of himself, so he played it straight. But the whole time, I know what I wanted to do the old bastard. I just needed a way to make something off it. He wasn't stupid enough to make me his heir and put a bounty on his head, even if he got stuck allowing me next-of-kin rights, and after growing up with less than nothing because he couldn't take responsibility I wasn't going to take less than all I had coming."

Ryland was surprised at how easily the poison seemed to spill out of her. He'd expected to confront her with the facts, get a lot of denials or silence or just insults in response. He hadn't expected a confession, and especially he hadn't thought she'd be so freely filling in details.

"But when he was assigned to do research on Ragol, you saw your chance."

"I told you straight about it, what he was interested in, what he was doing. And Stane really was his rival, just another full-of-himself old fool drunk on power. I gave you his name as a red herring, but I guess you didn't fall for it. Ah, well, you can't have everything."

"So you found a buyer, recruited the Slashers as backup, and then went after your father. Dorn didn't want to turn you in, but he didn't want to just walk away and let you get away with murdering the man who'd been his patron. So he backed off, tried to pull himself together, and come to a decision: turn you in, or join up? Only while he was thinking, you were acting, and weren't willing to take the chance of him going the wrong way. And he didn't know you'd brought your old gang in on the job—and quite probably painted him as a cold-feet sellout just to make sure that they'd go along with cutting him down." He paused, then looked at her curiously. "Why did you recruit the Slashers in the first place? They were just a drain on your bottom line and a clue that came back to point at you."

"Backup muscle. I couldn't trust that Mick Co. would pay off in cash instead of a shot in the head, if I didn't have protection. And they could only point the finger at Cyndra Vallere. Dorn was the only one who knew I was also Revelle Lucerne, since I'd already left the gang when the bastard set up the new identity."

"I see."

"Here's what I don't get," Lyon cut in. "Why did you hire us in the first place?"

"To find this." She waved a hand to indicate the virtual-reality environment. "Dorn gave me that damned riddle and I couldn't figure out what it meant, and I'd already had him killed so I couldn't ask him."

"_He_ tell you the riddle?" Ryland was genuinely surprised. "Good grief, why?"

Lucerne smirked.

"Because, he was in love with me. You get it now? He'd told me before any of this went down about how the old man had a secret hidey-hole for stashing data, even gave me the hint."

"I see. And Dr. Lucerne sent this data here because it was the only place he _could _send it to keep it out of your hands on Ragol, making just a sad coincidence you yourself were the person who could access it—not as a legacy left to his daughter, but because 'Revelle Lucerne' was Dr. Lucerne's next of kin, will or not, and so CALS acknowledged you as effectively being him for his _personal_ system activities. So you hired us to solve the riddle and because the riddle itself said you needed hunters so you wanted us as backup for the retrieval."

"Exactly. And you pulled it off fine. All right, you learned too much, but we can work with that. An extra twenty-five thousand meseta each ought to repay you for the added brainwork in putting the pieces together, right?"

"And end up like Barton Dorn?"

Lucerne snorted.

"Please. You're not idiots or you wouldn't have me at bay. I'm sure your e-runner brother has already set up a data drop on a deadman switch so that if I cross you the whole thing goes to the Lab or the milipol or becomes the lead news story on InfoNet. And once you take my money, you're accessories, so you'll burn with me if you try a double-cross or blackmail. It's just good business for us both, right?"

"Let me tell you something," Ryland said.

"What?"

"You murdered your father and stole from him because he used your mother for thrills, then walked away and left her, not caring enough to stay in touch or give her any way to tell him about you, so that the two of you grew up in poverty and she ended up dead, being a single mother probably making it all the harder on her. When he met you on _Pioneer 2_, you made him acknowledge you but he had the fake identity created because he couldn't face up to admitting the real you, with your real circumstances, was his daughter. In other words, both back then and now, he was a selfish pig who walked away from family responsibilities."

He paused to let that hang for a moment, before finishing.

"I'm not."

He raised his head and spoke to the air.

"We're done here. You can come get her."

The VR field shut down, structures vanishing to leave nothing but a huge, empty domed room with a floor of green hexagonal tiles, very similar to how it appeared when the VR space was set up for Spaceship Final although with completely bare walls. The shimmer of multiple teleports cleared to reveal several uniformed IntSec officers who quickly moved to take Lucerne and her data-laden PDL into custody.

A fifty-foot-tall screen appeared at the far end of the room, showing an elegantly dressed woman nearing middle age, with her red hair pinned up and a monocle over one eye.

"Did you get all that, Chief Milarose?" Lyon asked.

"Yes, of course. CALS recorded the entire encounter, and I found it most educational to watch. It's always so much easier when wrongdoers confess in their own words. I do thank you for the return of Dr. Lucerne's research data. I can only wonder at _his_ motive for preparing this hiding place for it. Like father, like daughter, I suppose. Traits do seem to run in families."

Lyon glanced at her partner.

"I'm glad that applies to the good ones, too," she said.

~X X X~

The room in the Medical Center hadn't changed its appearance since the last time: the same walls, the same screens, the same blonde Newman girl lying comatose in the bed.

"I wish I could have seen her face as the IntSec guys dragged her off," Kendric muttered. One significant difference was that this time he didn't bother with a disguise.

"That's easy to arrange," Lyon offered. Her presence at all was the other major change. "I can connect my visual memory to a display screen and replay the entire confrontation if you like."

The younger Ryland brother actually managed a grin at that.

"I didn't mean it literally, Lyon."

"Ah. I wasn't quite sure. I knew it could be an idiomatic usage, but I also know that many organics do find emotional fulfillment in seeing their enemies' downfall first-hand."

"You've got a point there." He sighed. "It's just, while I'm damned glad she's going down for this, it doesn't actually help Justine."

Ryland nodded.

"Revenge can't fix what's broken; it only makes sure that the breaker doesn't profit by it." He paused a moment, then added, "So there's been no change from the doctor's reports?"

"No, actually, they now think she'll come out of it. Recovery, though, that's going to take up to six months. The wireburn damage was nearing the irreversible stage, and making repairs without causing memory loss or...behavioral side-effects...is slow and delicate work." He gave a long, heavy sigh. "At least that's something, though. She got really lucky in a way; even as late as yesterday, they said, it was no better than a coin flip to know if they'd be able to get 'all of her' back."

He was starting to tremble, until his older brother's hand came to rest lightly on his shoulder.

"I don't know why I feel this way," he said softly. "I mean, she's not just a bounce, sure, but I'm not sure I could say I love her, either. Not in the sense of spending my life with her, having a family..."

"It's like I told you before," Lyon said. "It's something you Rylands share, that sense of responsibility. You may or may not _love_ Justine, but she's yours all the same. Just like Ryland feels about you."

Lyon had the rare pleasure of seeing two men blushing at once.

"I didn't say—"

"That is—"

"Men!" she snorted. "You ought to be _proud_ of yourselves for it, not blushing like schoolgirls. If Kylan Lucerne had half that character, he'd be alive now picking out Christmas-tree decorations with his daughter instead of him being dead and her facing life as a test subject."

"It's no more than she deserves," Kendric growled, then blinked. "Wait, what was that?"

"Three murders, including of a Lab scientist, while on a Lab mission, in territory that's under Lab jurisdiction. That should trump one contracted killing on the ship, _if_ the milipol wants to make an issue out of it, which they probably won't. I'm guessing she'll end up 'volunteering' for something ferociously unethical and likely black-budgeted."

Kendric glanced at his brother.

"Did you know about that?"

"I did."

"Good," the young man said, smiling wolfishly. "Justine's the kind of girl who'd like an over-the-top vengeance."

"She deserves it, especially since it's partly because of her we caught Lucerne or Vallere or whatever she wants to call herself."

"How?"

"We had suspicions, but proof? Evidence enough that we could feel confident walking up to Natasha Milarose and saying, 'we have the killer of a Lab scientist and know where to find his stolen data,' knowing what lengths she might go to? I might not even have realized Lucerne was responsible, except that she just couldn't resist gilding the lily."

"Gilding the—? Big bro, you could use expressions that have actually been in use since this ship left Coral, you know."

"It means to add overly elaborate elements and unnecessary embellishments that work against what you're trying to do. In this case, Lucerne kept trying to 'sell' her story to us. That's why she had Justine attacked by her Slasher friends. She knew about me having a brother who lived Downtown from the hunter grapevine and the Slashers tracked you from there. The point was to prompt me, not to run away, but to be motivated to look harder and also to be hotheaded about it, maybe to take the bait and go after Stane to keep the truth buried under red herrings. But time and again we found nothing that would let anyone else know we'd been hired. That created my first suspicion: that she'd told the Slashers _herself_ and everything else was window dressing."

"I get it. It's like Dorn's reports, the ones you had me check on after you came back from Ragol."

"Right. She could have just told us that Dorn _told_ her the phony story, but she had to dress it up with evidence, those fake simple-mails. Except you got into her PDL and found that she'd received them _after Dorn's death_. That's because she didn't think up the idea of them until she realized she needed to hire hunters. And she should have had 'Dorn' tell a better story—at least, one that explained Cyndra Vallere being missing, like saying that she'd been lost over a cliff or something while exploring the island. Something, at any rate, that didn't make it obvious Vallere was a person of interest."

"Be fair; at the time she never expected we'd check on Ragol to see what happened," Lyon pointed out.

"True, but a better lie would have accounted for the possibility. There's no need to tell lies that don't accomplish anything. All it does is give your enemies more chances to expose you."

"Which one of us grew up in the underworld again, Donny?"

"Kid, if you think academic research isn't an underworld, you just haven't been paying attention."

Kendric's eyebrows shot up.

"What's this 'kid' stuff?"

Ryland grinned.

"You think you're the only one who can use nicknames?"

"_And_ you're talking like a human being, not a professor!"

"You're talking like a human being, not a thug," the Force noted.

"The both of you are listening to the android when she points out how silly you act towards each other normally?" Lyon suggested.

They shared a look.

"Any way we can get out of this without admitting she's right?" Kendric asked.

"I'll let you know if I think of something."

"Cute," Lyon said. "Ryland, we'd better get going. We're already late for Terence and Rina's Christmas party, and you know she wants at least one other android there. I think she wants to set me up, though."

"That kind of scares me. Kendric?"

"Nah, go on. I'm going to stay here a while longer."

"Are you sure? I know Rina wouldn't mind another guest. Actually, she'd probably be thrilled."

"I know, but...I think I'm going to stay a while. I know Justine can't actually tell the difference like she is now, but she doesn't have any family and, well, it is Christmas. I'll stop by when visiting hours are up in another hundred beats, okay?"

Lyon nodded.

"Yeah, that's fine. I'll have Rina save you some of her egg nog."

"AI-made egg nog?"

"Don't look at me," Ryland said. "I'm as confused as you are. We'll see you there, Kendric."

The partners got about halfway down the corridor to the elevator before Lyon spoke up.

"I'm sorry that your Christmas gift turned out like it did, Ryland. Family betrayals don't exactly make for happy holiday entertainment."

"True. On the other hand, Chief Milarose noted that we _had_ found Dr. Lucerne's missing data and caught his murderer, so we did complete the terms of the Guild Quest, so she authorized payment in full for what was owed us, plus a bonus."

"Oh? You didn't mention the bonus. That was surprisingly generous of her."

"She'll probably recoup it from the assets of Dr. Lucerne's estate," Ryland noted cynically, "which no longer has an heir to pass to since the next of kin was the killer. For all we know the Lab was his will's beneficiary anyway. So at least we can pay Gowan and Naomi and still have something for ourselves out of all this. Besides..."

"Yes?"

"It's an object lesson."

He stopped in front of the elevator and pressed the call button.

"Oh?"

"You have to admit, there are similarities with myself and Kendric. Only...seeing the kind of ways things can go sour in a family, it's a reminder to me to not go down that same path."

"The two of you have been snapping at each other quite a bit less than you were when this job began. Of course, part of that is him learning that you weren't so neglectful or careless that it all was your fault, so he stopped jumping down your throat any more and claiming you were. But even so...maybe it was good for you both."

"Excuse me?"

"Well, you're fundamentally honest people, both of you—in terms of emotions, of course; we won't talk about Kendric's work," Lyon amended. "So when it was pointed out that he'd been wrong about you being at fault and you'd been wrong about him being irresponsible and careless, you faced up to it and you started treating each other more like the people you are and not the people you thought you were."

The elevator doors swished open.

"So in a way, I really did get a Christmas present out of this. You tried to give me an entertaining job, and instead you got me a better relationship with the only human family I have left." They stepped forward. "Given that the Christmas holidays are supposed to be a time for renewing and reestablishing those ties, I'd say that means something."

"I guess so. Hey, wait; what did you mean by, 'human' family? Do some Newmen come from Ryland genetics or something?"

He touched the button for the lobby.

"I meant, here it is, Christmas Eve, and I'm spending it at a party with you."

She looked surprised, something that her facial structure didn't convey well due to her irisless eyes but that he'd come to recognize over the two years he'd known her, then pleased and a little embarrassed. But it was true, he thought as the doors slid closed. After all, "family" didn't just mean a genetic connection; they were the people you opened your heart to, and Ryland figured that under that definition his partner—and best friend—qualified as well as anyone.


End file.
